ABSTRACT
In 2003, Germany introduced a bottle deposit system, with the aim to decrease single-use containers as well as related environmental burdens. Although the deposit system realised many benefits, its introduction also led to the phenomenon of people collecting containers for gaining the deposit as extra income. With increasing societal inequality, the pool of potential bottle collectors has been growing. While existing literature focusses mostly on the individual level of this phenomenon, for example on tools or health dangers of collectors, we argue that for a broader understanding the activity rather than the individual needs to be evaluated. This is even more reasonable since the group of collectors features quite large heterogeneity. We thus aim to show that the activity of collecting bottles is congruent to a social-inclusion-mechanism for individuals at the bottom of the pyramid. By means of interviews with bottle collectors in Germany that has been analysed through inductive content analysis as proposed by Gioia, we find that while society tends to see bottle collecting as outcast activity, interestingly, many collectors use the extra income exactly for including themselves in societal sub-systems of their choice. Further implications for how to end scavenging arise and are discussed in the context of existing literature. We conclude the chapter with conceptualising the inclusion mechanism through bottle-collecting and provide opportunities for future research.
