Then you find yourself standing in the supermarket with three cans, behind a fanatical deposit collector with five garbage bags full. Those waiting times can now be over. In Breda, among other places, there is a huge deposit machine that can handle 100 to 120 bottles and cans per minute. And these types of machines are on the rise.
A whole bag full of cans and bottles: you just dump it in at once. The enormous monster is located on the Markkade in Breda, right next to the recycling center. Entering your bottles or cans one by one is no longer necessary. You get the money back via a Tikkie.
“It’s thirty to forty times faster,” says entrepreneur Merijn Delvaux, who had the machine installed at his company. “He’s really fast.” Delvaux was also regularly annoyed in the supermarket. “There has to be a better way?” he thought.
Customer with 1500 cans
Inveterate soft drink drinkers are willing to take a detour, the entrepreneur noticed. “We have had people from Zeeland, Den Bosch or Roosendaal. I have even had customers with 1500, 1000 and 800 pieces. It is not feasible to do that manually in the supermarket.”
Why don’t supermarkets organize this en masse themselves? “I think the machine makes too much noise. It is also very large at 28 square meters.”
Yet the major supermarket chains are happy with the machines outside their locations, Delvaux notes. “They have less hassle and they also need less space to store their deposit.”
Packages of bottles and cans
The machine automatically makes flat packages from the bottles and cans. So you don’t need a shelf stacker like you do in the supermarket, who has to empty the bottle conveyor so often. Although the containers full of cans and plastic must of course be collected on time.
The deposit goes to Statiegeld Nederland. The entrepreneur receives a certain surcharge per bottle or can. “I make a little money from it.”
The entrepreneur is already dreaming of a second vending machine, if this one is a success. “I hope to collect 300,000 to 400,000 units per month.” There is also a bulk vending machine on Kronosstraat in Tilburg.