Why is Britain’s Delay with its Deposit Return Scheme Bad News for the Ocean?

Deposit return schemes have recently returned to the news pages in the UK as the government has announced that it will be delaying its plan to implement the system until the end of 2024. This has caused a large amount of upset and outrage amongst environmentally-conscious individuals as it means that the UK’s deposit return scheme won’t be hitting the streets until a mighty six years after the plans were revealed. This speed of change is very slow when you consider just how enormous, pervasive and fast-moving the plastic problem is. Every day, millions of plastic bottles are discarded, many of which make their way into our natural environments where they can cause a very real threat to our wild species. By delaying this scheme, which aims to tackle unnecessary waste, we are asking our already battle-bruised oceans, rivers and their inhabitants, to hold on for a few more precious years.

Whilst England, Wales and Northern Ireland have shelved their deposit return schemes until 2024, Scotland is still working towards getting their 17,000 return points ready for the launch of the initiative in 2022. Their plans see every retailer which sells drinks for takeaway to also operate as a return station whilst other enterprises, such as schools, shopping centres and transport hubs, can volunteer to collect used drinks containers. They hope they will save £62 million per year on tackling the indirect impacts of litter whilst also keeping four million tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the air over the next 25 years.

So what exactly is a deposit return scheme? Let’s say you are walking home from work one hot summer’s day and you nip into a corner shop to buy a cool bottle of water. When you pay for your drink, you will be charged an extra 20p on top of the normal price. On your way to work the next morning, you pop into the shop to return your empty water bottle and receive your 20p back. Therefore, this is not really an extra cost, simply a deposit which aims to encourage people to recycle their waste. In busy areas, you will place your used drinks container into a reverse style vending machine which later sorts containers by material and decides whether or not they are recyclable. This is a lot more efficient than our current recycling scheme where many people often get confused over what can and cannot be recycled and contaminants often mean that recyclable materials are instead redirected to landfill. These reverse vending machines are then emptied and the sorted waste is taken to the recycling plant where it is washed, squashed and transformed back into a shiny new bottle. As these schemes use machines to sort through different types of waste efficiently and use financial incentives to get people to recycle, they actual have 40% higher collection rates compared to our kerbside recycling schemes. Whilst this may sound a fairly innovative idea, we are actually just moving back towards the old way of doing things when milkmen would collect empty glass bottles from our doorsteps and reuse them the following week.

The UK, and many other countries the world over, desperately need deposit return schemes as the UK alone uses 13 billion plastic bottles every year, with only 57% of these being recycled. In other countries with larger populations and poorer waste infrastructure, these figures are likely to be a lot more dramatic. Did you know that every plastic bottle ever made which has not been recycled still exists in nature? They could be lying deep in a landfill site which neighbours a rural village, hiding in a park hedgerow or floating in a million little pieces somewhere in the ocean just waiting for a hungry creature to hoover it up. Every year we go without a deposit scheme in place, 8 billion extra drinks containers are dumped in our fragile environment. In the six years between the UK government announcing and implementing the scheme, that will total a whopping 56 billion containers. Not only is this devastating news for our planet but it is also extremely inefficient in terms of raw materials and financial cost.

The UK government have cited the Covid-19 pandemic as the reason for their delay in introducing the deposit return scheme but as Surfers Against Sewage’s survey has distinctly pointed out, 80% of the British public have developed a greater appreciation for the environment as a result of the pandemic after spending more time exploring and getting to know their local areas. We now have a population which more than ever is willing to back environmental policies and protect our environment whilst the idea of a green recovery has been discussed since the start of the pandemic. The last year has changed the way we all live dramatically, however it has also given us an opportunity to redesign and refresh our systems and choosing a more sustainable way of living will boost first our planet’s health and subsequently the health of our own human population which relies heavily on our natural resources. Creating a circular economy has been talked about for so many years and a deposit return scheme would be a fantastic step towards this new sustainable future.

However, ministers are still undecided about which type of deposit scheme they will eventually turn into a reality. An ‘on the go’ scheme would see only containers under 750ml be eligible to be returned which some argue targets the biggest chunk of littered drinks containers but would still exclude a massive amount of potentially valuable rubbish. Surfers Against Sewage have calculated that if such a scheme were to go ahead, 58% of the drinks containers found washed up on beaches would be excluded from the deposit scheme. If, for example, only plastic was accepted in the scheme, we would also likely see a shift in demand as consumers would move away from endlessly recyclable aluminium cans to plastic bottles which can only be recycled a limited number of times before being sent to landfill. Therefore, an ‘all in one’ approach is favoured by many environmental charities and The British Soft Drinks Association and would allow consumers to recycle drinks containers of any size and any material including plastic, glass, and aluminium. All these materials would be recycled into new high quality products which can be extremely valuable to manufacturers whilst also costing less than using virgin materials.

Already, 40 countries and regions have deposit return schemes in place which have helped increase recycling rates whilst also providing new green jobs for local people. Let’s take a closer look at Norway which has one of the most successful deposit return schemes in the world. Norway currently has 3,700 reverse vending machines up and running with a further 1,100 manual collection points set up around the country in quieter and smaller locations. Each time a citizen returns either a plastic or aluminium container, they can choose to receive between 20-30p back or be entered into the national lottery. The legislation which covers the scheme is a meagre one page long but this has allowed the industry to take control and make all the decisions which means the system has become incredibly effective as the more waste that is recycled, the lower the taxes paid by the industry. They have decided to place strict packaging guidelines on the scheme which define what is and isn’t allowed to be returned which has meant the quality of the recycled product is extremely high and therefore valuable to many businesses. They even have an option for you to get drinks containers which you purchased online returned as delivery drivers happily accept your empty bottles and cans. Norway now recycles more than 90% of their plastic bottles, helping keep their beautiful shorelines and fjords plastic free.

If you’re feeling convinced that deposit return schemes are a great idea, why not join all the other ocean lovers on social media who are sharing photos of beached bottles and abandoned cans and tagging their local MP in the hope that their collective message will reach the government. Adding the hashtags #depositreturnscheme and #wildbottlesighting can further help your post reach even more people. If you’re a business owner and feeling particularly strongly about this issue, did you know that you can run your very own deposit return scheme right now? Our natural environments are full of so much beauty and have proven over the last 12 months just how important they are for our mental and physical health; can we really afford to delay our environmental plans by a few more years?

By Neve McCracken-Heywood