There's an article in the Chinese media today about reverse vending machines for plastic bottle recycling. The idea is simple: the machine identifies recyclable bottles by scanning the bar code and then spitting out 0.05 or 0.1 yuan in payment. The machines have actually been in Shanghai and Beijing streets and supermarkets since late last year. They have been a big success, particularly with scavengers who after the economic downturn saw the machines providing payouts greater than the market rate (due to the decline in demand for recycled plastic bottles). In fact, the price has been so good that one scavenger collected a large number of bottles and cashed them in via the machine causing management in Shanghai to replace payment in cash with a souvenir coin. You can see more here, here, here and here.