Container materials in deposit return schemes

Deposit return systems (also known as deposit return schemes or DRS) can play a crucial role in encouraging the return of drink container materials. Learn more about the types of beverage container materials included in a DRS, to promote recycling and create a fair playing field.

Effective deposit return systems accommodate the drinks sold on the market today. This means considering beverage type, size and material the container is made of. The material included in a deposit system – such as plastic, metal, glass and liquid paperboard – is defined by legislation. Typically, policymakers focus on the beverage packaging commonly used by producers, as well as considering the recyclability of container materials.

Man pouring out containers for recycling

In the loop

The most common types of materials found in deposit return systems are plastic, cans (aluminum and steel) and glass. Several programs also include liquid paperboard (cartons) and refillable containers.

Even leaving out one type could mean millions of recyclable containers are wasted and potentially littered. A broad scope of accepted materials reduces consumer confusion about eligible containers, so encourages more DRS participation from the public and means more recyclable materials become part of the Clean Loop Recycling system.

Learn more about Clean Loop Recycling

Plastic bottles sliding down a chute to be sorted

Considerations for drink containers

• Ease of recyclability: An effective DRS should include as many material types as possible, as most drink container materials are highly recyclable, representing a low threshold for recycling efforts.
• Level playing field: Including all container types creates a fair playing field among beverage producers. Otherwise, it risks consumers switching to container types left out of the DRS, to avoid perceived price rises.
• Corporate social responsibility: Sustainability is high on the public agenda and consumers are paying more attention than ever to businesses' green credentials. DRS participation contributes to recycled-content goals and green commitments.
• Potential of the technology: Today’s reverse vending technology can handle all types of drink containers. This opens new possibilities for what can be collected — even new material types in future recycling systems.

Incentivizing beverage container returns

A key aspect motivating high collection rates in a DRS is a financial incentive to return drink containers for recycling. This is what separates deposit systems from other programs: the deposit encourages consumers to treat packaging as a resource, rather than trash. Home recycling bins are convenient but do not address on-the-go consumption, which one study found is 30-50% of US beverage consumption.¹ On-the-go consumption can be a key contributor to litter.

The European average collection rate for PET beverage containers in a curbside system is 47%, versus 94% in DRSs.² In the US, on average 27% of non-deposit containers are collected for recycling vs 72% of deposit containers.³ As regions (especially European Union member states) pursue ambitious recycling, collection and recycled-content targets in coming years, DRSs have proven to be a reliable way to achieve high performance.

The importance of separate collection

Maximizing the number of containers collected is half the challenge – the other half is maintaining the material’s purity throughout the process to drive high rates of recycling. This ensures drink container materials can join the Clean Loop and become new containers, reducing the need to create containers from virgin materials.

When a container is returned separately in a DRS, it avoids contamination from other kinds of household recycling or waste; contamination can make the recycling process complex and costly. When materials remain pure and of high quality from the beginning, the risk of being downcycled, incinerated or landfilled is reduced.

Learn more below about the most common beverage container materials in deposit return systems, how that material is recycled, and its role in preventing waste and driving a circular economy.

Woman with plastic for container materials

Recyclability of plastic

Plastic beverage bottles are typically made of PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate) or HDPE (High-Density Polyethylene). Produced from petroleum, a type of fossil fuel, it takes a quarter of a liter of oil to produce a single one-liter water bottle from virgin plastic.⁴ And, when over a million plastic bottles are sold every minute⁵, the total volume of oil is vast.

However, PET and HDPE are highly recyclable materials, and resources that can be reused again and again to produce new beverage containers. Unfortunately, scientists have determined that of all the plastic ever produced, only 9% has been recycled.⁶

What happens to your plastic container when you recycle it?

After plastic containers are returned for recycling, they are collected and sent to a sorting facility. They are then sorted by material type and color. A recycling plant next cleans the containers to remove any contaminants (like labels and glues) or food residue. It shreds or crushes bottles into small flakes, which may be melted into pellets. These are then sent to manufacturers to be re-melted and injected into preformed molds, to shape them back into new bottles.

These new drink containers are then filled with the next beverage and distributed to stores, where they are purchased, consumed and returned – then the cycle repeats.

A staggering 32% of plastic packaging waste leaks into our environment.⁷ Eight million tons of plastic end up in oceans every year (one garbage truck per minute), and by 2050 there will be more plastic in the sea than fish. As well as impacting wildlife and eco-systems, humans are now ingesting a credit card’s worth of microplastics per week through protein, drinking water, and even beer.⁸ Plastic bottles take almost half a millennium to break down in nature and release harmful greenhouse gases as they decompose.⁹

Deposit return systems are a land-based solution to the problem of ocean plastic, preventing plastic beverage containers from ending up as litter in nature in the first place. Research shows the number of new bottles made with recycled content is significantly higher in a DRS than in other collection systems.¹⁰ For this reason, a DRS helps reinforce that plastic should not be perceived or treated as disposable, but as a valuable resource.

Learn more about plastic pollution

Woman with glass for container materials

Recyclability of glass

Glass bottles and jars are 100% recyclable and can be recycled endlessly without any loss in purity or quality. This type of glass has a 1:1 recycling ratio, meaning that when one glass bottle is recycled, a full glass bottle can be produced from it, generally in less than 30 days.¹¹

38 of the 45 deposit systems in place today include glass bottles, and 12 of those include one-way/non-refillable glass. Glass drink containers in a DRS can achieve high collection rates, with the glass bottle redemption rate across Canada’s deposit systems averaging 85.6%, with one region (Northwest Territories) even achieving a 100% return rate.¹²

Overhead view of empty plastic bottles of assorted colours

Glass production

New glass is produced from sand, soda ash, limestone and other additives for color. While there are no shortages of these materials, extraction and processing consumes natural resources and energy. Recycling glass saves energy and is more economical.
• Permanent material: Glass can be used infinitely, making it especially important to be collected and enter the Clean Loop, where its high quality can be preserved and the material reused. If left in landfill, it would take around one million years to break down.¹³
• Energy savings: Recycling glass uses only 30% of the energy needed to make new glass from raw materials, as crushed recycled glass melts at a lower temperature, extending equipment life. Using 10% recycled glass (cullet) in new glass production reduces CO2 emissions by around 5%.¹⁴
• Reduced cost: 1 kilogram of recycled glass is the equivalent of 1.2 kilograms in raw materials, and can replace up to 95% of the materials needed for production. This causes a cost reduction which, when combined with energy savings, provides a stabilizing effect on the cost of creating glass containers.

Glass bottle being returned for recycling

Separating glass from other household recycling or waste

DRSs achieve the highest recycling rates, due to no contamination from other materials. Glass poses a particular challenge in roadside recycling as it can break and contaminate other materials, reducing its own value at the same time. Separating glass from other recyclable materials through a deposit system ensures 100% of that glass can be reused – by contrast, a survey of 45 material recovery facilities accepting curbside glass found almost 40% of their glass ended up in a landfill.¹⁵

Bottles in a conveyor at a beverage whoelsaler

What happens to your glass container when you recycle it?

When recycling companies collect glass containers, their first step is to remove non-glass items using magnets and air suction – this keeps the glass purity and quality high.

Lasers separate the glass by color, and it is then crushed into small pieces. The cullet is melted in a furnace at 1500 degrees Celsius, and key ingredients are added before the liquid glass is divided into globs. These globs are blown into new bottles and jars which can then be filled, used and recycled back into the loop.¹⁶

Recyclability of cans

Metal is another "permanent" drink container material that can be reused endlessly, so it is important to keep these materials pure and of high quality, to remain in the loop. Recycled cans, made of aluminum or steel, can be made into new beverage cans in as little as 60 days.

Using recycled cans to make new containers saves on average 95% of the energy required to smelt raw bauxite ore. Recycling one can can save enough energy to run a television for three hours. Also, the high value of scrap aluminum means including this material in a DRS can help fund the system through commodity sales.¹⁷

What happens to your can when you recycle it?

Cans are taken to a recycling centre where they are combined with other cans to be shaped into a large bale, ready to take to specialist aluminum recyclers.

The bale is shredded into smaller pieces, which are heated into molten aluminum. These are formed into a pure block of metal (“ingot”) for easy transportation and further processing. It is this material that is used to form new cans.

Can moving through reverse vending machine

Spotlight: The Netherlands

Until recently, the Netherlands’ DRS only included PET plastic bottles over one liter, leaving out smaller plastic containers and all aluminum containers. Of the approximately 900 million small plastic bottles sold every year in the Netherlands, around 100 million are estimated to end up in the environment. As a result, the government introduced a deposit on plastic containers smaller than 1 liter from July 2021.¹⁸

The government also found that 150 million beverage cans are thrown away each year. As a result of rising litter volumes for cans, it announced in 2021 that cans would be added to the DRS from 2023.¹⁹

Joint statement Can Manufacturers Institute, National Association for PET Container Resources, and Glass Packaging Institute (USA)²⁰

Woman with cartons for container materials

Recyclability of LPB

Liquid paperboard (LPB) is the packaging material generally used for flavored milk, juice boxes and cartons. Because this packaging is so lightweight, it requires less energy to transport and refrigerate than other beverage packaging. It is made from cardboard, plastic and, in some cases, a thin layer of aluminum foil. Paperboard makes up the largest proportion of these materials, about 88% of a 1-liter carton of milk.

Liquid paperboard is currently included in the DRSs in many Canadian provinces and several states in Australia. There is a growing trend in integrating LPB in upcoming new DRSs. Tetra Pak, the world's largest producer of LPB, has expressed in several markets a desire to be included in the DRS.

It is essential to seize the moment by implementing an ambitious DRS, that includes a wide range of packaging materials. Limiting the scope of the scheme would be a missed opportunity, particularly if low carbon, renewable packaging formats, such as carton packages, are excluded. If cartons were to be included in the DRS, it would increase the volume of good quality, recycled paperboard available to the industry, allowing further investment to be made in carton recycling infrastructure.

Alex Henriksen Tetra Pak²¹

What happens to LPB when you recycle it?

When cartons are collected, they are sorted and separated into paper/cardboard streams. The materials are baled together and sent to paper mills, where the bales are shredded and blended with water to break down the materials.

This mix is screened and separated into paper pulp, plastic and aluminum layers, before going through de-inking to remove dyes or colors used on the products. The paper pulp is then ready to be processed and turned into new paper products like paper towels, tissue and paper bags.²²

The effectiveness of high-performing deposit return systems is seeing growing interest in other container materials and beverage types.

Recyclers return crate of refillable containers

Refillable beverage containers

Refillable containers are cleaned and used again, without melting and re-forming, so require less processing and are therefore better for the environment.²³ Refillable systems were common in the early 1900s, and DRSs can facilitate a transition to reusable containers by prompting consumers to return containers and building the collection infrastructure to make refill/reuse possible.

Oregon’s refillable beer program started in part because the infrastructure and cost-sharing between producers was already in place through a non-refillable DRS. Germany leads the way with one of the world’s most successful refillable beverage schemes – with a 41% refill quota, collecting 98% of refillable containers annually (25.4 billion fillings), as well as 98% of one-way containers (20.5 billion containers).

SodaStream CO2 cylinder returned for reuse

SodaStream CO2 cylinders

To encourage SodaStream owners to return their used carbonating cylinders for refilling and reuse, a pilot for the return of CO2 cylinders has been implemented across America and Europe. Like a DRS, consumers receive in exchange a voucher as credit toward the purchase of a new SodaStream CO2 cylinder.

SodaStream, part of PepsiCo, is a world leader in at-home beverage preparation. A SodaStream carbonating bottle could replace thousands of single-use plastic containers. The pilot to return cylinders to TOMRA reverse vending machines helps SodaStream go a step further for the environment.

Coffee cups

Around 500 billion coffee cups are produced worldwide each year. Disposable coffee cups are lined with plastic that is tightly bonded to the paper. This prevents leaks, but means they cannot be recycled at standard paper recycling plants.

South Korea aims to implement a DRS on single-use cups from the end of 2022 onwards, in addition to its current deposit system for glass bottles. New laws for the usage of recycled materials in food contact packaging also means South Korea's DRS is a step closer to realizing cup-to-cup recycling.

TOMRA has demonstrated the ability of reverse vending technology to take coffee cups, so adding cups to the list of drink containers a DRS can handle is not far away.

Illustration of DRS white paper globe and containers

Deposit return scheme best practices

Learn the success factors of the world's highest-performing deposit return systems for recycling beverage containers.

Download TOMRA’s white paper discussing what effective deposit return systems deliver, the key elements high-performing deposit systems share, and dozens of case studies on real-world implementation of deposit return policy.

Download white paper

TOMRA has 50 years' experience in deposit return systems, working in 40 deposit markets, in every part of the value chain. With approximately 80,000 installations across 60+ markets, TOMRA’s reverse vending machines capture 45+ billion used drink containers each year for recycling.

Questions? Get in touch.

Footnotes

Beverage container materials in deposit return schemes

What types of materials are included in deposit return schemes?