‘We Like It a Lot’: How Romania Created Its Hugely Popular Deposit Return Scheme

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.