After it was revealed that in 2023 only 41.3 percent of plastic packaging was recycled in Spain, compared to a target of 70 percent, the Spanish government has announced it will launch a deposit and return system.
The new system will comply with the current Waste Law and will be set up across the whole of Spain by January 1st, 2027.
The way in which it will work is that consumers will pay an additional fee when purchasing a product packaged in single-use plastic. This money will then be refunded when they return the empty container to the shop.
This is similar to the system used the past in Spain with glass bottles.
When analysing companies in the recycling sector in countries where similar systems are already in place, Spanish news site Cadena SER, estimated that the price of a plastic bottle or container should cost €.010 to €0.20 cents in Spain.
This means that drinks or other liquids that come in plastic bottles will now be €0.10 to €0.20 more expensive to buy, but they money will be returned to you when you take the empty one back to the store.
According to sources in this sector it will only apply to plastic bottles of less than three litres at first. It is hoped that the same will happen with aluminium cans and cartons in the future.
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Carlos Arribas, a recycling expert at the NGO Ecologists in Action praised the new system saying it would prevent “the illegal dumping of thousands of tonnes of plastic waste into the environment, a problem that affects people’s health”.
A total of 130 Spanish entities already also support this change.
According to calculations from the Ministry for Ecological Transition, 214,039 tonnes of plastic bottles entered the market in Spain in 2023, of which 74,482 were collected separately by local entities and another 14,017 by private collections.
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It showed that only 41 percent of this plastic has been collected and recycled with the current yellow container system.
A total of 59 percent was not collected, which may mean non-compliance with the objective established by Directive (EU) 2019/904 of the European Parliament, which called for the reduction of the impact of plastic products on the environment.
Similar deposit and return systems are already in place in several European countries such as Germany, Norway, Sweden and Finland, as well as further afield in Canada and some North American states such as New York, California and Michigan.
READ ALSO: What are Spain’s recycling rules you need to know about?
