The deposit return scheme in other countries: what actually happened to companies

1. What actually changes on 1 October 2027

Four lines:

• A flat 20p deposit is added to every in-scope drinks container at the point of purchase, and refunded in full when the empty container reaches an authorised return point.

• In scope: single-use PET plastic, steel and aluminium containers between 150ml and 3 litres.

• Glass is excluded in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Wales includes glass, but initially without a deposit attached, to avoid immediate labelling changes.

• The duty sits with producers and retailers. Only grocery retailers are required to host return points. An office, a factory or a warehouse is not.

That last line is the one worth reading twice, because it cuts both ways. You do not have to comply. You also do not get the deposit back automatically. The scheme is designed around a consumer walking an empty can into a shop — and nothing about your office kitchen resembles that.

2. The countries that already do this

Three things worth pulling out of that table.

The UK's 20p is at the low end, and it is flat. Germany charges 25c and has done for over twenty years. Ireland charges 25c on anything over half a litre. Only Germany also uses a flat rate — Ireland and the Netherlands both tier by size. A flat 20p means a 330ml can and a 3-litre bottle carry the same deposit, which is simpler to administer and proportionally much heavier on the small containers an office actually buys. Around 85% of UK in-scope containers are 500ml or less.

The 90% target is normal, and it is hard. The Netherlands has had a legal 90% obligation since 2022 and has missed it every single year — 74% in 2023, 77% in 2024. Ireland is at 76.4% two years in. Germany needed roughly a decade to get where it is. The UK is giving itself three years to reach a number two neighbouring countries are still chasing, which tells you how hard the system will be pushed, and how little slack there will be for containers that do not come back.

Nobody gets to 100%, ever. Germany is twenty-three years in, with the densest return network in Europe, and still loses two to four percent. That gap is not a teething problem that resolves. It is the permanent condition of these schemes, and it is where the money in section 3 goes.

→ How the deposit works on cans and bottles in Belgium

3. Where the deposit goes when nobody returns the containers

The mechanism is simple and it is not in your favour.

You pay the deposit when you buy the drinks. The refund only happens when the container reaches an authorised return point. A can that goes into the office mixed-recycling bin never reaches one. So the deposit is not lost in the sense of being mislaid — it is unredeemed, and unredeemed deposits fund the scheme. They go to the scheme administrator, not back to the employer who paid them out of the pantry budget.

Ireland shows the scale of it. In 2025, Irish consumers and organisations returned 1.4 billion containers — a 76.4% return rate, up from 877 million the year before. Genuinely successful, and the recycling rate for in-scope containers went from 49% before the scheme to over 90%.

And in the same year, €60.1 million in deposits went unredeemed. Down from €66.7 million in 2024, so it is improving. It is also still €60 million that somebody paid and nobody got back, in a country of five and a half million people.

Those are Ireland's figures, in a country with a different scheme and a different deposit. The point is not the number. The point is that a 76% return rate sounds like a success story until you are the one holding the other 24%.

"Won't our waste contractor handle it?" No — and this is the assumption most likely to cost you money. A managed-office waste or dry-mixed-recycling contract handles the material, not the deposit. Those are two separate systems. Whether any UK provider will offer a bulk reclaim route for commercial waste holders is unsettled: containers that reach a materials recovery facility have bypassed the return points entirely, and it is not clear the recovery would cost less than the deposit is worth. Several providers are building DRS advisory offers. Treat "we handle DRS" as a claim to verify in writing, not one to assume.

→ Cans, bottles or a dispenser: what actually makes sense for an office

4. What actually changed inside offices in the Netherlands and Belgium

This section is the reason this article exists. It is also entirely unsourced. Nothing below is copy.

We were serving offices in the Netherlands when the bottle deposit arrived in July 2021 and when the can deposit arrived in April 2023, and in Belgium through its own rollout. We watched what happened in those buildings — not in the policy documents, in the kitchens.

What this section has to cover: where the empties actually ended up. Who got landed with the returning, and whether that was ever anybody's job on paper. What broke down after the first few weeks, once the novelty of the collection bin wore off. What customers started asking us for in month two. What they stopped ordering.

Concrete instances, with the setup and the numbers. Not a summary of a pattern.

Containers avoided per installed REFILL+ system per year, NL fleet, 12 months to August 2026 — converted at 15 cents into deposits never paid

The Dutch scheme is enforced, not encouraged. The Dutch regulator issued a €28 million penalty over can deposits — a useful corrective to anyone assuming a scheme like this settles into being optional.

→ The €28 million fine that shows how deposit schemes get enforced

5. Hospitality and venues: where you are in scope

If your business sells drinks — a hotel bar, a café, a restaurant, a conference floor, an events space — you are not a bystander in this. You are a retailer, and that is a different conversation from the one above.

Ireland is the closest live precedent for what that means day to day. There, any business selling in-scope drinks registers with the scheme, including hotels, restaurants, bars, cafés, catering operations and event venues. A take-back exemption exists for premises that cannot practically host returns, but it comes with an obligation: display a notice directing customers to the nearest return point. 

Editor's note: if this confirmation does not land before publication, cut this section entirely. Do not publish it hedged. A wrong compliance line in front of a hospitality operator is worse than a missing section.

→ Water for hotels and venues

6. What it will cost your office from October 2027

Run the arithmetic at your own scale. Ours, for a mid-sized office:

50 staff × one canned or bottled drink a day × 220 working days = 11,000 containers a year. At 20p, that is £2,200 a year in deposits alone — on top of what the drinks themselves cost. Recoverable only if somebody collects, stores, sorts and physically returns every one of them.

Swap your own headcount in. At 200 people on the same assumptions it is around £8,800 a year, and at that volume the storage question stops being trivial: 44,000 containers a year is a pallet's worth of empties moving through a building that was not designed to hold them.

Two thousand pounds may not frighten anyone on its own. So here is the sharper version of the argument, and it is the one that matters:

The deposit is refundable in theory. The labour never is.

Nobody refunds the hours. Somebody has to decide where the bags live, notice when they are full, load them into a car, queue at a reverse vending machine and bring the money back to whoever owns the budget. That person did not sign up for it, and in every market we have watched, they are the reason the scheme quietly stops working inside a building after about six weeks.

→ Work out the numbers for your own site: Water for offices

7. The four things organisations abroad actually did

The fourth row is the only one of the four that removes the problem rather than managing it.

→ See the REFILL+ range

8. What we would tell you not to do

Do not build an in-house collection and return operation. We have watched offices try it in two countries and we have not seen it hold. The deposit is refundable; the labour is not, and the labour lands on someone whose job description does not mention it. If your drinks volume is small, absorbing the deposit is the honest answer and it costs you less than the alternative.

If all you want is a smaller pile of empties, buy fewer containers. That does not require us. Switch what the office drinks, cut the multipacks, put a jug on the meeting-room table. Several of those cost nothing and none of them involve a supplier. Anyone telling you a 2027 deposit scheme is a reason to buy equipment is selling you something before they have understood your building.

And if what you actually want is a basic water cooler, we are the wrong supplier. We sell a mains-fed system with still, sparkling, chilled and flavoured water, connected telemetry and a service contract behind it, and we are priced accordingly. If the requirement is cold water in the corner for as little as possible, there are companies who do that well and we are not one of them.

What we will commit to is service, because that is what this market is actually judged on.