this has 2 major consequences: it invites homeless people to pilfer through the trash - often throwing it down without cleanup. secondly, it invites people to take bottles from outside the jurisdiction of the reward and "redeem" them. Thus stealing money from the program.
In practice, number 1 really never happens in Sweden. Sure, there are people looking for bottles in public trashcans, but they are not exclusively homeless nor do they leave a mess behind after collecting any potential recyclables from the cans. Private trashcans don't really contain recyclables as everyone collects what containers they buy and redeem them at the store when going to buy groceries. Number 2 doesn't happen either because the bottles have to have barcodes that actually grant the reward, which foreign containers do not.
This problem is noticeable here in Amsterdam too -- homeless people tend to just take the whole garbage bag out of the can, and empty it on the sidewalk so that it's easy to spot and collect all statiegeld (deposit) cans and bottles.
It looks like the best solution the municipality has managed to come up with so far is to attach metal cupholder-like thingies to new trash cans, and people are expected to put statiegeld bottles and cans there, so that others can take them later and get a refund. Though I don't know how a regular uninformed person is supposed to figure out what these cupholders are for -- it's not intuitive at all.
Around here they're polite and don't make a mess. But on the flip side you could only go around making a mess so long before you got beat up or something and good luck getting a police response for that so it's probably not in their interest to be obnoxious.
