Environmental Idiocy of the Day: German Bottles Edition

An inspiring story of aspiring entrepreneurs:

They brought 150,000 ersatz grape soda bottles, made for a few cents each in Lithuania, to the eastern German state of Schleswig-Holstein and started trying to cash in.

They were trying to get the 25 cents per bottle deposit you see: unfortunately they got caught. Bishop Hill, from whom I stole borrowed this tale  insists that the greens who thought up such schemes must be lunatics:

So here we have, ladies and gentlemen, greenery in action. Bottles are made to order in Lithuania, shipped across the border to Germany and are then melted down to make new bottles. 

Well, yes, but there's a deeper lunacy at work too. In the same article we see that:

For businesses, they say, the bottle-return situation is one big pain in the pop-top: They spent 1.5 billion euros on automated bottle-exchange machines, and operating costs are around 500 million euros a year.

Operating costs of € 500 million a year? Which lunatic suggested this scheme? Surely no one is even possibly claiming that the recycling of bottle saves that much in environmental costs now, are they?

And of course that's only one of the more visible costs. Germany's a bit bigger than we are (80 odd million to our 60) so we'll say they've got 30 million housholds (to our 24). Collecting up your bottles and feeding them into the machine takes, ooooh, say, 5 minutes a week? or 130 million (yes, million) man hours per year. At a reasonable €10 per hour that's €1,3 billion a year.

It simply isn't possible that the environmental benefits of recycling bottles are €1.8 billion a year. So what this scheme is actually doing is making Germans poorer.