Buy a bottle of water or a can of beer in Malta and you pay ten cents more than the shelf price says. That ten cents is a deposit, not a tax, and you get it back when you return the empty.
The scheme has run since November 2022 and is operated by BCRS Malta. Almost nobody explains it to visitors, so a lot of ten cents goes uncollected.
What is in the scheme
In and out of the scheme
- In
- Water and flavoured water, soft drinks fizzy or still, beer, cider, ready to drink coffee and flavoured alcoholic drinks. Plastic, metal and glass alike.
- Sizes
- Between 0.1 and 3 litres. Anything smaller or larger is outside it.
- Out
- Wine, spirits, milk and dairy, fruit juice and nectars. Put these in the recycling bag as normal.
- The mark
- Containers in the scheme carry the BCRS logo and a barcode registered here. A bottle bought abroad and carried in will not be accepted.
Getting the money back
You feed the empties into a reverse vending machine. There are several hundred of them, at supermarkets, some beverage shops and the public recycling hubs. The machine reads the barcode, counts the containers and prints a voucher.
Where the voucher is worth something depends on which machine you used. A machine inside a supermarket gives a voucher for that shop or that chain. A machine at a public recycling hub gives a voucher any registered retailer will take. Vouchers last twelve months.
Why the machine rejects things
The container has to keep its shape. Crush a bottle or stand on a can and the machine cannot read it or handle it, and it comes straight back out. Leave the cap on and do not squash anything.
The barcode has to be readable, so a bottle that has been in the sea or had the label torn off is a lost cause. The container also has to be empty.
Keep the empties in a bag rather than binning them, and run them through a machine at the supermarket on the way past. A family gets through enough water in a week for it to be worth the trip.
What it is for
Malta had a serious problem with bottles and cans in the streets, on the beaches and in the sea. Putting money on the container changed the arithmetic: an empty bottle is worth picking up. The target is to collect nine in every ten containers sold.
You will see people collecting bags of empties from bins and beaches. The scheme was designed to make that worth doing.
The list of machines and the rules on what is in the scheme are published by BCRS Malta.