A deposit-refund system (DRS) applied to packaging can be defined as a system in which consumers pay a
certain amount in concept of “packaging deposit” added to the price of a product and receive the refund back
when they return the used packaging. Such systems are currently in place in some European countries such
as Finland, Denmark and Germany, whereas other countries like the UK, France and Belgium refused to
apply it. In Spain, especially in the Eastern regions of Balearic Islands, Catalonia, and Valencia, there is an
ongoing debate on the suitability of implementing such a system in order to increase recycling rates for
household waste. Two key aspects of such a system, as intended in Spain, are first that the goal is not to
reuse the packaging, but to recycle the materials, and second that since not all types of packaging waste
would be affected by this new system, it would inevitably coexist with the green dot kerb-side collection
scheme currently in place in the country, managed by Ecoembes and Ecovidrio. We present a social
footprint assessment of implementing this new system, carried out as part of a wider project assessing
environmental (through LCA), economic and social aspects of the DRS implementation in Spain.
Slides available her: Social footprint presentation SETAC Rome. Extended abstract below.
The study compares Spain’s 2014 packaging-waste management system with a hypothetical scenario in which a deposit-refund system is introduced for beverage containers made of PET, HDPE, steel, aluminium, beverage carton and glass. The DRS is assumed to collect 90% of the targeted containers and to operate alongside the existing Green Dot kerbside collection system, which continues to manage packaging outside the DRS. The functional unit is the annual management of 2.5 million tonnes of packaging waste. In the modeled DRS scenario, 57% of this waste mass passes through the deposit-refund system.
The assessment uses a monetary social-footprint method based on input-output data. It combines two components: income redistribution, which represents changes in utility when money is transferred between societal groups, and productivity impacts associated with missing governance, measured as the gap between actual purchasing-power-adjusted value added and potential value added when those impacts are internalised. The authors describe this as a streamlined social life cycle assessment. Project data for the two scenarios were used to model packaging flows and system operations, while Exiobase 3.3.10 supplied data for the social footprint of activities and their supply chains.
Both modeled systems have a negative social-footprint result, which the authors interpret as a net social benefit. However, the hypothetical DRS scenario has a smaller benefit: the reported total changes from −€5,067 million to −€2,013 million (2011 purchasing-power-parity euros, utility-weighted), a reduction of about 50%. The comparison indicates that the modeled social costs of the activities needed to increase recycling outweigh the benefits associated with greater recycling and reduced production of virgin materials. Transport and retailer activities, including manual or automatic collection at shops and supermarkets, account for particularly high social impacts in the comparison.
These results describe a modeled 2014 Spanish system and a hypothetical deposit-refund scenario; they are not a universal conclusion about every DRS design. The assessment was part of a broader ARIADNA project that also examined environmental and economic aspects. Its social results should therefore be read within the scenario, data and method defined by the study.
