On the last day of my holidays, I found myself heading to a supermarket with a Volta point, together with my family, to return the bottles we'd piled up during our stay. Ahead of me in the queue were two women: one very elegant, carrying one of those shopping bags that cost you 2 euros at the grocery store; the other with a young child and dozens of bottles in bin bags. While we waited, the elegant woman finished feeding her bottles into the machine, and the woman with the child started on hers. I thought about handing her our bottles instead, but I didn't have the courage to say so. The mother fed them in, the child fed them in, some got rejected and came back out. It felt endless.

The day before, we'd seen a young man on a moped picking up bottles at dusk, two large bin bags in hand, going through bins along the road. Clearly, for some people, this has become a new source of income.

Meanwhile, the woman with the child finished, and the elegant woman came back with two more bags, filled to the brim, to put through the machine.

I tell this story to explain something about how we perceive people depending on the context we see them in. Because those two women were doing exactly the same thing, yet one seemed to be doing it by choice, the other out of necessity. This might be an unfair conclusion on my part, but when I saw the news about the Mayor of Lisbon and the criticism of the Volta system, I realised that, in truth, most of us think this way, because our perception of rubbish shapes how we see the people handling it. I'd love to have the superpower of knowing people's stories just by looking at them on the street, and being able to write here exactly who chose to be there and who needed to. I, for one, needed to, because once I'd committed to my kids that we'd do this, I didn't want to give up just because it was taking longer than expected.

There's a layer to this topic I don't want to get into, because I think it's a more political and social debate about why some people end up in this situation. One thing is clear to me: that isn't solved by scrapping the Volta system. We'd simply lose visibility into it. It's the same as saying that removing park benches would end homelessness. It wouldn't. It would just push people somewhere else.

Why Volta fails at perceived value

On one hand, we have modern, good-looking technical infrastructure that must have cost hundreds of thousands of euros to roll out in some locations. There was clearly investment in creating a different perception, it's not quite the same as chucking a bottle in a recycling bin, it feels cleaner, at least. But because the perception of the act itself was never addressed, it's still, fundamentally, a waste processing station, and so the people who go there are rubbish pickers.

To explain why I think this, I need to walk through a framework we use at Codepoint when building gamification systems, called Octalysis. Developed by Yu-kai Chou, it organises human motivation around eight core drives:

1. meaning

2. accomplishment

3. creativity

4. ownership

5. social influence

6. scarcity

7. curiosity

8. loss

The two axes that organise these eight drives:

Left brain vs. right brain

• Left brain: accomplishment, ownership, scarcity, loss → logical motivation, driven by goals and calculation.

• Right brain: creativity, social influence, curiosity → emotional motivation, tied to personal expression.

White Hat vs. Black Hat

• White Hat: meaning, accomplishment, creativity → positive drives, giving a sense of control and wellbeing, but generating less urgency.

• Black Hat: scarcity, curiosity, loss → urgent, addictive drives, creating immediate action but potentially generating anxiety if overused.

Can you spot how many of these are actually being used in the Volta system? 

Volta relies on a single trigger: avoidable loss.

You pay the 10-cent deposit at checkout, and you "lose" it if you don't return the packaging. It's an effective mechanism, one of the fastest to drive behaviour, but also the most basic one there is. The result is predictable. When the only value being communicated is financial, it attracts purely extractive behaviour. People aren't recycling. They're hunting 10-cent coins in bins. It builds no connection. It creates no identity. It gives people no reason to feel good about what they're doing, beyond the money itself. And so it also creates no different image of others when we see them doing it.

Since I don't want to just criticise but actually offer solutions, I'll bring this into the field I know: software. This comes from our experience at Codepoint building web and mobile apps with this kind of incentive structure. But the logic applies to the Volta system regardless of whether it runs through an app or not. Here's where I think more foundations for motivation could be built for citizens.

1. Meaning (Epic Meaning & Calling)
Feeling part of something bigger. It's not "I recycled a bottle," it's "I'm helping save the planet." It's the strongest long-term driver, but also the hardest to communicate genuinely. This axis could work through, for example, awareness campaigns in schools and bringing the whole household into the action. Imagine a mobile app linked to the Volta system that allowed shared accounts, so I could see the impact of my entire household, not just the person who happens to carry the bottles to the machine. For parents, one of the reasons we sort our waste, recycle, save water, is wanting a better future for our children.

At the same time, it brings children into this dynamic. They'll be using this and other systems for many years to come. Whether it's the best idea in the world or the worst (there are certainly better ways to help the climate crisis), do we want our kids growing up to be that annoying colleague who says recycling doesn't matter because it all ends up in the same lorry anyway? Or do we want our kids, with a healthy critical mind, to look at systems like this and think: I'm not doing any harm, and whatever little I can contribute, I will?

2. Accomplishment (Development & Accomplishment)
Levels, badges, progress bars, a sense of evolution. It's the classic driver behind any points system or "unlocked achievement" in most games. It means not isolating each transaction to its own moment, because that's when it's just a 50-cent or two-euro voucher. It means being able to see that, over a year, I recycled X kilos of plastic, and feeling the positive reinforcement of understanding the impact of putting that waste through Volta instead of into general waste. There's a lot of fun that can be built here, unlocking rewards even if they're purely visual.

3. Creativity (Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback)
Being able to experiment, try different combinations, see the result of what you do, and adjust. It's what makes Lego more addictive than following an instruction manual. There isn't much room for creativity in the act itself, you have to physically take the bottle, but there can be creativity in how you use your balance. For example, contributing to different social causes, the way we do with income tax: you enter an association's tax number, and that amount goes to them. We could have brands matching donations made through the system, increasing their impact. Again, this impact needs to be visible over time, not just in the moment.

4. Ownership (Ownership & Possession)
The feeling that something is "mine": an accumulated balance, a collection, an avatar, a profile. It's why watching a number grow in your own account is far more motivating than watching the same number on a generic screen. In the same way, there's ownership in the progress itself: being able to proudly say you've already reached "Vasco da Gama, the Explorer" level.

5. Social Influence (Social Influence & Relatedness)
Comparison, competition, approval from others, belonging to a group. Rankings, sharing, anything that involves other people seeing what you do or doing it alongside you. Here we make gamification shareable: reaching a new level, I can share it in the family WhatsApp group to spark conversation; making a donation, I can share it with a nice image. We create competition: which city in the country recycles the most, proportionally to its population? It wins a bonus. Who in the household brought the most bottles to the machine?

6. Scarcity (Scarcity & Impatience)
Wanting something precisely because it's limited or hard to get. Limited editions, waiting lists, "this week only." Here we can tap into a negative emotion: what happens if we don't recycle? Why does this measure matter for the long-term viability of our planet? The climate crisis is, by its very nature, impatient.

7. Curiosity (Unpredictability & Curiosity)
Variable rewards, mystery, the "I don't know what I'll get." It's the psychological engine behind surprise boxes, raffles, and slot machines. It could be as simple as not knowing what level you'll reach next, or rewards tied to hitting a certain milestone, or randomly assigned bonuses on a given trip to the machine.

8. Loss (Loss & Avoidance)
Avoiding losing something you already have. It's the most immediate driver of all, it triggers quick action, but on its own, it doesn't sustain long-term behaviour. This is the one Volta uses when it charges us and then gives back the 10 cents.

To conclude, if we want to make the system more motivating, we need to bring these other axes into the mix. Recycling can't be about the 10 cents on a bottle or can alone. And, once again, setting the social problem aside, whether by choice or necessity, the people who go to Volta to return their bottles and other people's are pretty cool. It's genuinely nice to contribute to making the world better for everyone, rather than just looking inward, only at ourselves. The method itself stayed simple: I take my bottles, I trade them for a discount at the supermarket or a voucher, and that part is worth keeping. But if I could scan my Volta QR code at the machine and see in an app everything I've saved, the full environmental impact I've had, I'd feel a much stronger sense of belonging to a cause that's everyone's.

We all see the system's flaws. But if we look at the problem through this lens, how would you go about fixing it?