We have been doing deposit and recycling for a long time in Sweden. And you’re far from alone in having queued up at the deposit machine at your local grocery store to get a deposit receipt in return.
Despite the fact that the Swedish people are meticulous about recycling, there are a lot of things that do not go through the deposit machine and later become a new product in recycled packaging.
If you snuff and have old snuff boxes piled up at home, there may now be a solution if you wish to get rid of the boxes and at the same time make a positive contribution to the environment.
Namely, such a solution has Elin Larsson Gudmundsson and Wilma Hjerpwho is in his last year of high school in Rättvik, developed with the help of his UF company “Recycle Dosan”.
With the help of a pawnshop, it has made a recycling machine for snuff boxes that is inside Hemköp in Rättvik.
This is how the “pawn machine” for snuff boxes works
– The idea came about because one of us has a boyfriend who snuffs a lot and he had a whole wastebasket full of only snuff boxes. Since most snuff boxes are made of plastic, we thought they should be able to fit and be recycled like regular PET bottles, Elin and Wilma say to News24.
The two friends and colleagues say that they got in touch with the CEO of Tomra, a world-leading player in automated return handling, who saw potential in their business idea.
The deposit machine only accepts plastic boxes and works by placing your empty box with the barcode facing up in the designated place in the machine.
– The machine is sensitive when it comes to reading the barcodes and therefore you have to place the snuff box very precisely according to the instructions that are available. The machine is programmed to read the barcodes of the snuff boxes and not all barcodes are programmed into the machine, but most types of snuff are accepted by the machine.
The machine accepts several snuff boxes. Photo: Private
Hope more pawn machines are launched on the market
As a user, however, you will not receive a deposit receipt or refund because there is currently no deposit on snuff boxes.
– Pawn also means that you pay a kroner when buying the product, which you then get back when you pawn the product or the packaging. Instead of a deposit, we have as an incentive that a kroner is donated to WWF Save the Baltic Sea for each recycled snuff box.
For those who hope that a similar pawn machine will appear in their home town, Wilma and Elin say that there is a possibility that there will be more machines on the market.
– There is a possibility that we will continue with this business idea also in the future because we have received so much positive response, but as I said, the UF company must first be liquidated, but you can later start it up again as a real limited company.
The prototype of the pawn machine is also being studied by other companies to see if it can work in the market in the future.