<
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/27/we-like-it-a-lot-how-romania-created-the-largest-deposit-return-scheme-in-the-world>
"In the Transylvanian village of Pianu de Jos, 51-year-old Dana Chitucescu
gathers a sack of empty polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, aluminium
cans and glass every week and takes it to her local shop.
Like millions of Romanians across cities and rural areas, Chitucescu has woven
the country’s two-year-old deposit return system (DRS) into her routine.
It is a simple scheme: when buying soft drinks or alcoholic beverages, the
customer pays an extra 0.50 Romanian leu (£0.09) per bottle and gets the money
back when returning the packaging, cleaned and in its original shape, to a
collection point (usually the same shops where the goods were bought).
Chitucescu makes about 40 leu a week from recycling her and another family’s
bottles. “That covers the food for my seven cats,” she said. “It’s a great
system, everyone in our village uses it, there’s always a queue at the shop.”
Her weekly walk is one tiny part of a national shift that, until recently,
seemed impossible. Romania’s recycling rates were among the lowest in the EU,
but in the two years since the scheme launched, beverage-packaging collection
and recycling has skyrocketed to as high as 94% in some months.
“It is a zero to hero story,” said Gemma Webb, the chief executive of RetuRO,
the company running the system in a public-private partnership with beverage
packaging manufacturers and the state. “The products are clean, there is little
contamination, they can be recycled easily and we have full traceability as
well, so we know every bottle that goes on the market.”
Romanians returned about 7.5bn beverage containers between the system’s launch
in November 2023 and the end of September 2025, according to the company. The
returns included 4bn PET bottles, 2bn metal cans, and 1.5bn glass containers.
More than 500,000 tonnes of high-quality recyclable materials have been
collected. “We are the largest fully integrated deposit return system
globally.”"
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-unstoppable-development-of-european-subway/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
