PET Juice Bottles in Germany to Require Mandatory Deposit
The majority of parliamentarians in Germany’s Bundestag have approved changes to German Packaging Law. This means that an extension of the mandatory deposit to include PET juice bottles will ultimately come into force as of January 2022. Stricter regulations on recyclability and the amount of recyclate in PET bottles will also apply in the future.
By including PET bottles previously not subject to a deposit in the system, it is extremely likely that more rPET will be available to the bottle-to-bottle loop — at least this is what many stakeholders expect. According to a study by packaging market research institute GVM from 2018, to date about 10% of all PET bottles each year are still lost to the closed recycling loop due to the limitations of the mandatory deposit system. This amounts to approximately 40,000 metric tons of plastic per annum that cannot be reused to make food packaging.