even higher deposit. Bottle crates have a deposit of €1.50. The reasoning behind the price discrepancy was to keep environmentally-harmful plastics from ending up as litter or in the regular garbage system. It was also meant to make non-reusable beverage containers more expensive and thus, less attractive. Retailers are only obliged to take back the material fractions that they sell. The deposit for refillable bottles is not defined by law. Germany's collection system is 80% automated and 20% manual. Most supermarkets in Germany have a reverse vending machine that is designed to be used by customers and which scans "Pfand" returns and prints a receipt for the total value of the refund which can be exchanged for cash or put towards the cost of future purchases. Supermarkets near the Danish border have established a scheme, where Scandinavian residents are exempt from "Pfand", by signing an "Export declaration" and providing that cans are exported within 24 hours and the contents are not consumed within Germany. The system has successfully encouraged the recycling of Einwegpfand containers. Between 97 and 99% of non-reusable bottles are returned, and recycling rates for cans are around 99%. On the other hand, the percentage of containers being sold that are reusable has actually decreased from about 80% to below 50% since the system was established. Since manufacturers keep the deposit on any unreturned containers, they are effectively incentivized to produce Einwegpfand containers which yield a higher profit if they are not returned. One estimate suggests they have earned €3bn on unreturned bottles since the system was introduced. At any given time, an estimated 2 billion beer bottles are in circulation in Germany, each of which sees an average of 36 reuses. Hungary In Hungary, beer, wine and standardized liquor bottles carry a deposit on them, which was liberalized in the recent past. Beer bottles have 25 forints on them, but for wine glasses and for liquor bottles, the sum is decided by the trader, which people can exploit by buying a drink in a certain retailer and bringing the bottle back to its rival who have a bigger deposit on it. PET bottles and metal beverage containers are taken back only by some super- and hypermarkets, such as Lidl, Auchan, Tesco, Interspar. They all use reverse vending machines to collect them: for bottles and in most places for the PET bottles they use a Wincor-Nixdorf or a