engleski

Economic aspects of a Deposit Refund System for beverage packaging

The packaging waste management through the market-based deposit refund system (DRS) is one of the ways to ensure sufficient quantities of plastic, metal and glass waste materials for the production of fully recycled packaging. Deposit refund systems have proven themselves with large amounts of collected and recovered waste packaging with a small amount of impurities within the collected material (which is a prerequisite for high-efficiency recycling in a closed loop system). Deposit refund systems in Europe regularly achieve collection rates of 80- 90% while systems without deposits achieve collection rates of 40% on average. Today, around 40 countries and regions in the world have implemented DRS (many more are currently considering it). This work is continuation of the previous study (in which Croatian DRS was compared to five best performing deposit systems of EU and EEA countries) and focuses on the development of detailed measures to improve its efficiency, taking into account the specificities of Croatian deposit return system. An economic analysis has been made at the example of Croatian DRS showing the economic side of such measures and how they could be successfully implemented without jeopardizing the financial stability of the system. As the main system costs were identified the compensation paid to the retailers (handling fee and investment into reverse vending machines for automatized collection of packaging at retailer stores), followed by transportation and logistics costs (including the costs of the counting/processing centers). In terms of system revenues, unredeemed deposits represent the largest source of income. This, however, depends on the return rate, because the higher the return rate (of packaging waste), the lower the revenues from unredeemed deposits. Second biggest income of the DRS comes from sales of packaging material to recyclers but this revenue is very susceptible to market prices which can oscillate substantially (evident from the past years). Considering all system costs and revenues, it was calculated that the average administrative fee that producers and importers of the beverage packaging (responsible for putting the packing on the market according to the Producer Responsibility Principle) pay for the operation of the DRS - packaging collection and recycling, in an efficient deposit refund system would be around 1.11 cents EUR per packaging unit (with the assumption of the return rate of 85%).

deposit-refund system ; packaging waste ; recycling ; waste management ; economic analysis

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