Deposit return systems now operate in Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Germany (EUR 0.25 single-use, dpg-pfandsystem.de/index.php/en/), Estonia, the Netherlands (EUR 0.25 large and 0.15 small bottles and cans, statiegeldnederland.nl/), Croatia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Latvia, Malta, Romania, Hungary, Ireland, Austria, Finland and Poland, with Portugal due in 2026 and Greece, Spain and Czechia planned. Return rates in mature systems exceed 90 per cent.
What happens: deposit material is clean and single-stream, so PET bottles genuinely go bottle-to-bottle at higher rates than kerbside plastic. Honest caveat: a site called Recyclemap (recyclemap.org) is a Ukrainian crowd-sourced map, not an EU locator.
How to start: reloopplatform.org/global-deposit-book/ (2024 edition, data to January 2025).