Sorry if I bothered you with a harmless little joke. I’ll be happy to remove it if this will help. What I wanted to express is that amenity=vending + vending=bottle_return is a poor approach imo to tag bottle return machines. To me it sounds like a place where I can buy machinery or other equipment for bottle return purposes.
These machines have been introduced as “bottle return machine” and only became “reverse vending machines” after a company called “Reverse vending corporation” startet to use this name as trademark. I do not think that in any other language such machines are called “reverse vending machine” in the national language and I also doubt that the average native english speaker would use this term for a bottle return machine without having read it before on one of these machines.
From following this discussion for a bit I feel that the term reverse vending seems unnatural to many, and not being a native English speaker myself I do agree. There is some indication that this one of cases where a brand became an actual term, but by far not as widely known or used like “Kleenex”.
Looking at what these machines do and where they add value is that they gives you money (a deposit) back. If they just collects recyclable materials, then there is not much value to differentiate if this is a machine or just a container for waste that can be recycled. So for the “no money back” cases, the current recycling tagging schema should be fine.
I case you do get money (or vouchers, or credits, or anything worth your deposit) back, we could tag them as amenity=deposit_return_machine. It describes what the machine does, it implies that you get your deposit/money back and - at least for Germans - it matches the widely used slang term “Pfandautomat” for these kind of machines ( Leergutautomat – Wikipedia ).
What you can return there could then be categorised in as much detail as necessary in deposit_return_machine=bottles;cans;food_containers;whatever
I am aware that this is not compatible with current tagging, but it seems that current tagging does not fulfil what people are looking for (see also Pontos Volta - Como mapear?).
I don’t think anyone has said they have real world issues with this tagging though? That’s not the problem OP had. It looks to me more like some of you became aware of what the tags currently in use are, and spontaneously came up with some of their imperfections.
I don’t disagree with those imperfections per se. But does someone actually care enough to create a proposal for the perfect tagset that describes the service point for returning beverage containers and getting a deposit/refund/voucher back, including migration and deprecation of the existing tags, getting editor support for the new tagset etc.?
The original problem is that we currently have two ways of tagging these machines that are not compatible. This by itself should be enough to at least try to reach a consensus on how to go on tagging this in the future IMHO.
By looking at it closer, I felt that both ways are also not really ideal/intuitive. Since I have developed an editor, I had to decide how to tag these machines when a user add a new one to the map. For displaying and searching, I support both ways. Of course I can pick any one that feels like the lesser evil (and this is what I am doing at the moment). But why not explore if there isn’t a better way.
Someone who added all the Volta machines in Portugal wrote a Wiki article (Volta PT - OpenStreetMap Wiki) telling people that this is the way to do it. But as far as I can see there was neither discussion nor consensus ahead of his bulk adding 2.500 machines. At the same time the locations of his nodes are way off (probably reverse geocoded addresses where the actual machine is sometimes 50-100 meters away from the node in OSM). So this feels like someone deciding on how to tag this, then telling the world that this is the way, and creating facts. As I understand the OSM community tries to behave differently.
Coming back to the tagging: Do we agree to disagree? Do we let two incompatible ways coexist? My focus is not so much on these machines per se but on how to implement places that are tagged differently in an editor, so this is where the question comes from. For most cases I found some agreement in the community (like addresses, etc.).
Funnily enough a similar “problem” had occured when thinking how to tag a machine for rental purposes. Luckily it was already tagged (amenity=vending_machinevending=kayak - anyone want to by a kayak from a machine? )
Imo the main problem with amenity=vending_machine follows from the mix of two things which really are seperate things, namely it being some sort of machine/automaton and its purpose of selling stuff. Purely logical there would be no need to duplicate the ‘vending’ aspect as it is currently done. Sadly we didn’t start with just e.g. amenity=machine + vending=* which could have easily be expaned to have another tag like returning=* (bottles, cans, whatever). But I guess that ain’t gonna happen.
So if someone comes up with a tagging which works for bottle return machines ideally that would also work for a lot of other edge-cases.
I think I prefer amenity=recycling with some tags.
At its core, what does a vending machine do? I can give it money, it processes that money, and then I get the item I requested.
Now the reverse vending machine. I give it an item, it processes that item, and then I get money.
See the issue yet? I don’t get any money from the machine. What I do get is a receipt of the items I put in there. This receipt can be given to the cashier to then get the points/vouchers/money/etc.
It’s a bit like giving a machine money and receiving a receipt of payment to then bring to the store clerk who gives me my requested item. This sounds a bit like a self-checkout, or a point-of-sale with extra steps. I don’t think they qualify as vending machines.
This is at least the case for the German systems.
At the end of the day, it’s a recycling container with some fancy software to check that it only receives the stuff it wants. The fact that I get something for my troubles can be tagged separately (and can’t really be checked at the machine anyways as it only gives me a receipt).
From the wiki (emphasis by me), “after the customer inserts currency or credit into the machine.” So the receipt is a form of credit that can be turned into currency (money) elsewhere.
This discussion is rather pointless, mappers using raw tags to map is clearly the exception these days and the exact value of tags and keys is even less relevant than if they used some kind of decimal classification. With other words as long as preset items use a reasonable name/description “Bottle return machine” or similar everything is fine and dandy.
And that applies, as has already been pointed out, to amenity=vending_machine too, in hindsight it should have been amenity=self_service_machine or so and we could have saved us years of pointless going around in circles discussions.
In a similar case of street cabinets, the standard tagging records separately the form as man_made=street_cabinet and function as utility=power: “This is a street cabinet used for electricity.”
A similar approach would fail here, since the form (vending_machine) and the function tag (recycling) are under the same key – nebulous amenity.
As Simon points out, it does not really matter in the end of the day, as long as the preset is reasonably named.
Guess I’ll add this one to the ever-growing wiki list of synonymous tags. Oh, it already has a section on “Recycling”… or should it go to “Amenities, attractions or other points of interest” instead?
man_made, amenity, building are overcrowded and should be used carefully. Sometimes we can’t avoid them but they should only hold concrete features, not properties.
I then respectably disagree about the preset approach. Tagging consistency and interoperability should be preserved, it’s a core asset of OSM. It’s not everyone’s business and presets help a lot, but we should not get blind about what’s under.
I got stuck arguing here, so I asked an LLM to read the whole thread and tell me what I was missing. Flagging that up front — the framing below is its idea, the words and the position are mine. It convinced me I was wrong twice, so here goes.
I withdraw amenity=deposit_machine and amenity=reverse_vending_machine. Adding a third primary tag while two are still competing is worse for every consumer on day one. @Mateusz_Konieczny’s point about unfinished deprecations was right and I brushed past it.
I also withdraw the reverse_vending:* namespace. It reinvents a taxonomy we already have. @Fizzie-DWG’s list of what these machines actually take maps almost one to one onto existing keys with real usage and editor support:
The bit I still stand by is that the defining property isn’t the machine and isn’t the recycling — it’s that you get money back. @Map_HeRo already pointed at deposit_refund=yes, which beats my recycling_refund=yes because it isn’t recycling-specific: it also covers staffed return counters. Add automated=yes/no for machine vs. counter, and opening_hours, which often differs from the host shop’s.
The wider point: whether this is “vending” or “recycling” is a label fight with a high migration cost and little information in it. The accepted containers and the refund are what anyone actually queries, and both attach fine to either existing scheme. So let’s agree on those and stop arguing about the primary tag.
For new mapping I’d use amenity=recycling + recycling_type=reverse_vending_machine, because it composes with recycling:*. But vending=bottle_return stays valid and un-deprecated — synonyms, consumers accept both, nobody retags anything.
Then revisit in twelve months with taginfo. If the subtags are widespread, the primary tag becomes a mechanical detail. If not, nothing was lost.
Does recycling:* fail for any machine you know of? That’s the assumption this rests on.
In Nederland, machines used to refuse anything non-refundable, including anything bought elsewhere. I think the new ones accept many things, but only refund the refundables (including stuff bought elsewhere) and dump the rest as waste. Soda cans and plastic soda bottles are refundable as long as the barcode can be scanned.
We see more and more soda can and soda bottle deposit receptacles attached to or next to waste baskets. Reverse vending, fee=no?
I prefer amenity=recycling + recycling_type=reverse_vending_machine as I do not like vending and think bottle_return is too limited, in the machines I know you can also return cans and in some even “beer crates”
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