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@FeartnTired This video isn’t strictly about the bottle return scheme, but about waste management in Finland in general. It’s from the environmental centre, and kind of advertis-y, but I have no reason to suspect they’re misrepresenting basic facts.

A coupld of take-aways, which aren’t explicitly stated in the video, but are a clear subtext.
One, these are very complicated systems that involve a lot of different laws and rules, as well as a lot of infrastructure that has to be in place for the laws and rules to work properly.
Two, these systems were developed over a long period of time, they weren’t put in place by a decree within any one, or even three terms of office. The groundwork started in the seventies, arguably even long before that. I’m sure the development process involved mistakes and bad ideas along the way, but over time the systems were refined, mistakes fixed and problems solved.

For example, the town where I used to live in built a massive waste processing facility, that turned out to be nearly useless. At the time it was quite the local scandal, and I’m sure it’s not the only one of its kind. What local officials get right in one place, they screw up through political wheeling and dealing in another, and vice versa. But the overall goal wasn’t abandoned, just because some people were being idiots.

Any government that thinks it can achieve results similar to those depicted in the video in a few years, or by a decree, or both, is on a fool’s errand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i1EoqMTRaY