A TOMRA Reverse Vending Machine (Photo: Lars Kristian Flem)
In 1971, the owner of one of Oslo’s biggest supermarkets approached Petter, then a salesperson of labeling and pricing equipment in the supermarket industry, with a problem. Under Norwegian law, supermarkets are required to refund customers for empty bottles, but in the early 1970s they were finding it difficult to cope with the large quantities of returned bottles. The owner needed some kind of automated processing system to stop supermarkets from drowning in empty bottles. With no such technology available at the time, Petter told the owner that he could ask his brother Tore, at the time an engineer developing the world’s first automated navigation systems, for help.