What is Swedish Panting?

It is more than Ulf being out of breath. It is, in fact, a fantastic plastic bottle and aluminium can recycling scheme which can earn you money. I’ve only just started doing it and I’ve got to say, I’m pretty taken with it. 

How Sweden's Pant Scheme Works

As I understand it anyway… Every plastic bottle or aluminium can sold in Sweden has a pant figure on it which you pay on top of the price of the drink. So a nice refreshing Palestine Cola (genuinely the best cola there is and they support Palestinian communities with their profits) might cost 14 sek (around £1.10) but you’d pay an extra 2 sek on top of that. Once you’ve finished the drink, you feed the can into one of the many machines attached to supermarkets around Sweden and that prints out a receipt for your 2 sek which you can put towards your next shop. 

Most supermarkets seem to have a pant machine attached to them, usually in a little corner tucked away, and they’re not massively pleasant places honestly speaking - the smell of the dregs of many sweet and/or alcoholic beverages in one place can be quite a lot. You also have to feed the cans and bottles in one at a time, unless you go to one of the express machines where you can dump a whole bag at a time, so it can be quite time consuming. And if there’s only one machine available you can feel the Swedish rage building up behind you (but of course, they’d never say anything directly…).

The receipt you get from the machine can only be used at that supermarket (not sure about the express machines because most of them are in recycling centres rather than supermarkets, although that’s changing) and it has a time limit for use - it has to be used within one year at my local shop. 

Why is Panting a Thing?

I do think that Sweden feels more aware of the environment than the UK, or maybe actively doing something about it is more normalised anyway. People seem closer to the environment - Stockholm itself is actually around 50% green space - and people are out in every weather. This connection is bound to build a sense of responsibility and you can see that in how clean the city is. It’s still a city, and it has its… grotty parts… but it is definitely clean and neat. 

The state also seems to take it pretty seriously, although I’m not yet at the stage, with the language, where I can see past the nonsense. It’s election time here and it’s striking how at sea I feel without even a glancing knowledge of what has happened before and the stuff left unspoken between the lines. 

The History of Sweden's Bottle Deposit Scheme

There was already a system of bringing back your glass wine and beer bottles to Systembolaget (the state owned alcohol monopoly in Sweden - I will probably write about that one day too, fascinating) which seems to have run along a similar lines - as in, you pay a deposit when you buy the product and get that deposit back when you bring an empty bottle back. 

So the Returpack company decided they wanted to expand this to aluminium cans. They were inspired by the existing Systembolaget system but that couldn’t be expanded for political reasons - they didn’t want to give people another reason to visit the booze shop - so the choice was made to put the machines in supermarkets. 

Schemes had already been set up in other countries whereby the manufacturers would take back their own packaging. My dad grew up in Huddersfield and there was definitely a system of bringing glass bottles back to even the smallest of corner shops there. Right up until my granddad died in 2000 we were taking our bottles of Ben Shaw’s Dandelion and Burdock back for a few pence. Returpack wanted a more generalised system whereby anybody could take back cans and bottles from any company. 

Special machines which would sort and squish cans needed to be invented and interested companies were invited to test out their ideas on the island of Gotland just of the coast of Sweden in the Baltic Sea. There were debates about the best way to squish cans - into a puck shape or lengthways with holes punched in them - and how best to recycle them. Then there was the issue of who would own the machines, how they would be serviced when there was a fault, how the shops would deal with a sort of reverse flow of goods (shops being designed for goods to leave them rather than come back) and the inevitable smell that I mentioned above. 

The scheme went live in 1984 and proved popular. Shops with the machines were busier than shops without them and over time the logistics were worked out so that bags weren’t left piling up and shops were properly compensated for the extra work that panting required (including counting cans by hand when the machines broke!). It was so popular that beer manufacturers started switching to cans over bottles which has a big environmental impact as they weigh so much less but also improved safety in the supply chain as there was no more broken glass to deal with. 

In 1994, Tomra (the winners of the machine invention race) added an option to recycle PET bottles. And then last year the price paid for pant doubled so cans are now 2 sek (15p) and larger bottles 3 sek (23p). That brings us up to where we are today. 

Panting and Me

My first introduction to panting was seeing people in town digging through rubbish bins looking for bottles. It’s quite an affronting sight at first but you really become used to it. Some bins have little extra bottle holders on the side so they don’t have to go digging and you will often see people leaving bottles and cans next to or on top of bins too.

At events like outdoor theatre or big picnic opportunities like Midsommar there will be people walking about with black bags asking for pant too. These are often homeless people, or at least vulnerably housed, and many of them are immigrants. This is a way that people at the bottom of the economic chain here can pretty reliably earn some money. It’s not pleasant work, but I can imagine it’s fairly well compensated if you’re in a city or at a big event. It also functions as a way of keeping the streets clean and one thing you really can say about Sweden, and Stockholm as a capital city, is that the streets are clean! 

We don’t tend to have many bottles or cans at home so we’ve only ever done the standard recycling or, at times, saved them for a student friend of ours who tops up her income when things are a bit rough. The big change recently has been working at the hotel. The amount of cans and bottles that people get through at the hotel is incredible! And mostly, they leave them by the side of the bin so I just whip them up and put them in a separate plastic bag. 

The hotel I work for is pretty big on recycling so we already sort our rubbish but I took it a step further a couple of weeks ago and tested taking a bag full to the pant place at my local supermarket where we earned 165 sek which is around £13 - not bad for two or three minutes shoving bottles and cans into a machine! I’ve done it twice since then and my pant total now is 745 sek which is around £58. How wild is that?!

I guess it would be less exciting if I’d have bought all of the cans and bottles and therefore paid the deposit but, I didn’t. Free money! 

So, I thought you’d be interested in a little money thingy from Sweden which brings together the environment, earning a little extra  and is just one of the many weird and delightful little titbits about the country I find myself living in.

There has actually been a scheme announced for the UK too, though it’s facing delays because they can’t decide whether to include glass or not. I’d sugest to them, as a financial coach, don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good - in other words, get on with it and worry about making it better later.

Love Eleanor. xxx