Deposit on Cans and Plastic Bottles Coming in the New Year: All Information

If you return the empty bottles and cans, you will also get your money back. This is to ensure that the packaging is recycled and does not end up in nature. The deposit system applies to all single-use beverage bottles and aluminium cans from 0.1 to three litres. Exceptions are made for hygiene reasons for milk and milk drinks.

The bottles and cans can be returned anywhere where the drinks are also sold, not just in the supermarket, but also at snack stands. From 1st January, those products covered by the deposit system will be marked with a corresponding symbol. To ensure that products that were already on the shelves but have not yet been sold are not destroyed, there will initially be a transition period.

Single-Use Deposit System Should Be Self-Financing

The products should not become more expensive due to the deposit, as the system should finance itself. On the one hand, through a producer fee that already has to be paid. In addition, for each bottle that is not returned, 25 cents remain in the system. The collected plastic and aluminium is also sold for reuse, thus generating additional income. The trade receives a compensation for the handling, so that no additional costs arise here either.

The aim of the multiple-use regulation is to increase the nationwide proportion of reusable beverage packaging to 25 percent by 2025 and to 30 percent by 2030. Currently, the rate is 20 percent.

Yellow Bag and Yellow Bin Also Coming in 2025

From 1st January 2025, plastic and metal packaging will also be collected uniformly nationwide in yellow bags or yellow bins. Vienna, Carinthia, Salzburg and the majority of Lower Austria have already switched to the joint collection of light and metal packaging in 2023. The result was that on average 20 percent more plastic and metal packaging was collected in the yellow bin.

The nationwide introduction should also help in achieving the EU recycling quotas. These stipulate that by the end of 2030, 55 percent of all plastic packaging must be recycled. This corresponds to a doubling of the Austrian recycling rate from 2022.

(APA/Red)

This article has been automatically translated, read the original article here.