Have you been accumulating glass bottles in your home and don't want to deal with it?

To give some context, I live in France (near the German border) and recyclying is taken quite seriously. For example, paper, plastic, and glass are expected to be recycled into their own designated containers.

And that's great! This helps the environment while lowering resource wasting.

However, when it comes to recyclying glass it's a little more complicated. There are no designated "glass trash cans" in your home area, which means you need to make the effort and go to your nearest glass recycling container to throw it away.

To give credit where it's due, the French have placed these glass recylcing containers throughout every city and made it quite accessible to most people.

On top of that, some bottles have a deposit meaning if you return the empty glass bottle to the store, you can trade it in for cash. The values can range from 0.08 € to 0.25 €.

The only issue is that:

1. Glass is heavy
2. Elder people and people with health issues have trouble doing this themselves
3. No means of transportation makes this endeaver quite tiring (students etc)

Due to these reasons, people have a tendancy to accumulate A LOT of bottles. And I'm one of those people. It's not shocking to see some homes with over 60+ empty glass bottles.

Today, I got rid of a whole bunch of bottles I've been accumulating this past year. To make the story short, I had 3 crates of 36 German bottles that had a deposit and I didn't want to take the time transporting it to a store in Germany. While I was throwing away some non-deposit glass bottles at the recycling container, I met a homeless man fishing for bottles that had a deposit.

I saw an opportunity and proposed that he come by and pickup the 3 crates I had laying around. He was rather surprised and said, "You have 3 crates of 36 bottles? That's like 5 € a crate, are you sure?". After agreeing, he came over with his bike and loaded the 3 crates and thanked me before leaving. I also tipped him as well.

At this point why not create a service that allows people to get rid of their glass bottles by requesting someone to come pick them up. This could be done via an app for example.

What's the business model? Well I'm still figuring that out and if it's even worth my time investing in.

There are three types of glass bottles from what I see:

1. Ones with a deposit (to be returned to the store for cash)
2. Ones without a deposit (to be thrown into the recycling container)
3. Ones that can be cleaned and reused by local associations, beer producer amateurs, etc.

Bottles with a deposit have clear value and depending on the quantity could pay for themselves.

Bottles with no deposit, well users would pay a fee depending on the quantity of glass bottles they wish to get rid of.

Bottles that to be reused by local associations, beer producer amateurs, etc, well open to ideas on that one.

The main problem is that while I do know people accumulate a lot of bottles, I don't have any stats on:

1. The percent of the population that accumulate bottles
2. The average quantity (by age group) of glass bottles

What are you thoughts on this idea and feeback?