Take it back?

The returnable drinks container rules. This October sees another stage in tightening up producers’ and retailers’ obligations on throwaway cans and bottles - in Germany, the country that has really set the pace in this area. Reusable bottles are pretty much the norm in Germany, where there are ingrained habits of taking the empties back to the local supermarket and reclaiming the deposit.

But non-refillable ‘throwaway’ containers have been gaining ground - until the beginning of this year. Then the law - the Packaging Ordinance - was amended, to impose 0.25 Euro deposit on drinks cans and non-refillable glass and plastic bottles. For an initial nine-month period, consumers bore the brunt of the inconvenience, since they had to return the wretched things to the point of purchase to claim their deposit back.

But shops and other outlets were required to set up systems for accepting all returns from 1 October, by which time environment minister Jürgen Trittin said there would be 100,000 such take-back points nationwide.As intended, the changes made throwaway containers less popular. Many consumers stopped buying them - and many shops stopped stocking them, so as not to be obliged to set up a take-back system.

The first six months of this year saw an overall 60% drop in sales of beverages in non-refillable cans and bottles. So will everyone be happy in the end? For consumers, that’ll depend partly on whether the take-back system works as smoothly as Trittin says. But retailers are still incensed about the cost of handling returns, with larger businesses having had to spend substantial sums on automated machines.

The national retail association even tried to get the courts to stop the introduction of deposits on non-refillables - although it was built in to the Packaging Ordinance legislation that this should happen if the share of reusable packaging in the beverage industry fell below 72%. (Which it did, several years ago, after which the government spent some time negotiating unsuccessfully with the industry on voluntary measures to remedy the situation.)

Then there’s the question of whether the deposit system constitutes a barrier to trade. Retailers, importers and foreign manufacturers say it does, since most imported drinks come in the non-refillable containers which it is effectively discouraging. Germany’s initiative could still fall foul of EU rules on this score, which would be a sorry irony, since the country’s Packaging Ordinance was introduced in the first place to implement the EU’s 1994 Directive on Packaging and Packaging Waste, and has been one of the most successful routes to achieving its goals.

12 October 2003