A reverse vending machine is a device that accepts used (empty) beverage containers and returns money to the user (the reverse of the typical vending cycle). The machines are popular in places that have mandatory recycling laws or container deposit legislation. In some places, bottlers paid funds into a centralized pool to be disbursed to people who recycled the containers. Any excess funds were to be used for general environmental cleanup. In other places, such as Norway, the state mandated that a vendor pay for recycled bottles, but left the system in the hands of private industry.
The main vendors of reverse vending machines are Tomra of Norway and Wincor Nixdorf of Germany, and Envipco of America, Envirobank of Australia and Reverse Vending Corporation.
Read more about Reverse Vending Machine: Operation
Famous quotes containing the words reverse and/or machine:
“During the late war [the American Revolution] I had an infallible rule for deciding what [Great Britain] would do on every occasion. It was, to consider what they ought to do, and to take the reverse of that as what they would assuredly do, and I can say with truth that I was never deceived.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Psychiatric enlightenment has begun to debunk the superstition that to manage a machine you must become a machine, and that to raise masters of the machine you must mechanize the impulses of childhood.”
—Erik H. Erikson (1904–1994)