sburns, the DR had an informal deposit system for decades for glass bottles that worked quite well. When you returned a glass soda bottle to the local colmado, they gave you a couple of pesos off your next soda. The local bottlers would then collect the unbroken bottles (shards not welcome) from the colmados.
But that system has been breaking down over the last 10 years or so. Soda bottlers in the DR are switching to PET -- lighter (therefore better for the fuel consumption of their delivery trucks), and no breakage (something both colmado owners and bottlers like). Also, more and more sodas are being sold in supermarkets (Pola, etc) and hypermarkets, and these larger stores don't want to mess with bottle returns.
As a result, fewer glass bottles, more plastic, and more plastic waste. The DR has no in-country PET recycler that I know of (would be happy to find out differently!), so even if collected it would have to be ground up and exported.
I'm told (hope this is true) that Cerveceria Nacional (brewer of Presidente) still pays for unbroken empty beer bottles bearing their brands, cleans them and reuses them -- which is why the botelleros do what they do. But also have heard that they are test marketing with PET and metal beer bottles in the DR, so maybe that too is about to about to go down the drain...
There are very few deposit/return systems in place in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) -- primarily Barbados and Grenada. Dominica, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago have all studied doing it, but didn't go through with it. Why? Strong opposition from the major soda companies and their local bottlers, say the local officials off-the-record. There's even recent pressure (from guess who!) to get Barbados to drop their system...