Tomra's 1972 bottle machine made recycling rational — and profitable

In 1972, watching grocery-store owners count and weigh empty bottles by hand, Norwegian brothers Petter and Tore Planke built in their garage the world's first fully automatic reverse-vending machine: feed in a bottle and it recognises, accepts and refunds it in seconds. On 1 April 1972 they formally founded Tomra — the name abbreviates 'TOMflaskeReturAutomat' — from headquarters in Asker, Norway.

The machine and the money made each other work: a deposit system is only as good as its redemption, and effortless redemption is what the RVM provides — so Tomra's machines became the physical infrastructure of deposit-return schemes. Norway was the pioneer: Tomra's first installation stood in an Oslo supermarket, Sweden's Systembolaget ordered 100 machines in 1974, the company listed in Oslo in 1985, entered the US in the 1990s, and by 2024 had more than 113,000 machines deployed across over 100 countries.

Tomra grew from the single machine into a global recycle-technology group — reverse vending, sorting and food classification — with close to 6,000 employees, about 98% of sales exported, and tens of millions of tonnes of resources processed every year. The brothers who wanted bottle returns to make economic sense had created the standard itself.