RE: EU Plastic Deposit System: Austria now has more than 200,000 people retrieving plastic bottles that others have already thrown away in garbage and recycling bins. What a waste of human resources.

I remember how in the 1980s I used to hand over beer bottles for 20 Soviet kopecks. For that money, you could buy 900 grams of black bread or two trips to the cinema to see a children's film. Or 1 liter of milk or 1 pack of ice cream. None of our kids rummaged through the trash—mostly it was our bottles—but they all knew you could make a good living if you didn't throw away a glass lemonade bottle. Lemonade cost 7 kopecks, and with the bottle, 27 kopecks.