It looks like there are competing and incompatible ways of tagging these type of machines, and I am wondering which one to use.
We find them under amenity=vending & vending=bottle_return (3 829) and amenity= recycling & recycling_type=reverse_vending_machine (2 512).
We cannot tag them both as both are amenity values.
There was a discussion when someone deprecated the vending version but this apparently has been reversed.
So which one is it? The one with more “in use”? Looking at the chronology someone used the second version in one large edit where most of the uses of recycling_type were added in one batch.
amenity=vending & vending=bottle_return is troll tagging and nonsense anyhow as these machines are not selling anything.
amenity= recycling
is surely a better approach, but I wonder why we should use a nonsense value like reverse_vending_machine for recycling_type, when just recycling_type=machine is sufficient to identify the kind of recycling facility.
I like this, except for one thing: Recycling is associated with “throwing away garbage that can be reused, so we collect it separately”.
But in the case of these machine - in contrast to recycling container - you get your deposit money back.
Your suggestion reads a bit like this is a recycling machine that takes your bottle instead of just a container where you can throw your bottles and I think that is what the other approach wants to solve with the vending framing.
Maybe add a recycling_refund=yes
?
But then we need four tags to tag such a machine properly, which might be a good trade-off?
I guess one may describe them as selling coupons / cash in exchange of a bottles.
It is not really what I meant as troll tagging when I invented this term. As amenity=vending on its own does not mean much - and it is still a machine of similar size and look, so meaning is not broken. Unlike say tourism=hotel involuntary=yes used instead amenity=prison.
because it would require deprecation of already used tagging…
we have several attempts at doing this causing widespread annoyance and self-contradictory daya and tagging problems and disputes, maybe we can finish one of those first?
also, it fails to describe “you get paid back” part
What about something like amenity=deposit_machine ? and then deposit_type=bottles; cans Don’t get hung up on the exact wording, but as we seem to neither fit it into vending or recycling, maybe it needs it’s own amenity type? As it really is neither a vending machine nor a recycling machine.
I think I would prefer the tagging to reflect what bottle return places represent to their users: a place where bottles / cans / beverage crates can be returned. amenity=vending_machine does not fit “return-type” installations like these well. On the other hand, tagging the society-level purpose (usually these locations are part of a wider recycling system) leads to a very broad and relatively meaningless amenity=recycling category. Do recycling centers and supermarket-type bottle return locations really need a shared top-level tag?
(This also reminds me of amenity=library_dropoff vs. amenity=vending_machine + vending=book_return or similar approaches. Sometimes coming up with a concise top-level amenity can be a good solution.)
What about something like amenity=deposit_machine ?
I’m wondering whether such an amenity tag should be scoped even more narrowly to beverage / food container deposit returns only? There are probably all sorts of other objects with some kind of deposit system, which would fit the “i can claim a deposit there” category.
well, to repeat myself: it would require deprecation of already used tagging…
We have several attempts at doing this causing widespread annoyance and resulting in self-contradictory data and tagging problems and disputes, maybe we can finish one of those first?
Mot convinced that purity benefits are great enough here. But I am not a native speaker of English and I have limited interested in pure, well defined and crystal categorization systems for sake of having them.
Maybe I am weird at thinking that amenity=vending is good enough here.
You have to admit that some kind of logical classification makes sense. A simple reason is that illogical classification makes people look for alternatives or maybe invent alternatives by themselves. Someone coming across amenity=vending & vending=bottle_return may well think what kind of nonsense is this and go for amenity=recycling which definitely fits better. The same may apply for reverse_vending_machine.
Vending machines are selling goods and recycling facilities are made to collect material for recycling purposes. That is a quite simple classification and I do not see any reason why it should be better to mix these up and start to map a recycling facility as vending machine.