Dark green is implemented, light green is project
Source: https://laconsignemaintenant.blogspot.com/p/la-consigne-en-europe.html (French)
I always wonder why there are no pan-Europe deposit systems in place, or at least some sort of recognition across the countries.
Imagine you travel from one country to another, you grab a bottle of water for your trip, and then you are supposed to return that bottle only in the country where you originally got it.
Or you not only miss your deposit—sometimes you can’t even throw plastic bottles to recycling collection points just because the plastic bottle you got doesn’t have their local sign/icon printed on the packaging.
Well, in Germany there aren’t even pan-country deposit systems in place. You often have to find a store where you can buy that bottle for them to accept it.
In Poland pfand begins in January 2025.
Portugal has had some level of this since I was born for beer beer bottles, but it’s very limited. Recently there have been even some machines popping up.
We just started implementing our own solution with a deposit system here in Hungary and it seems to be going just alright for now. We also had something like this for quite some time but now there seems to be a bigger push on the government’s side, so that’s something nice to see for a change.
In switzerland we incentivise it the opposite way.
You are taxed based on how much garbage you produce - what you recycled.
So people lose money if they don’t recycle cans/pet bottles.
