The head of BCRS, the company running Malta’s drinks container recycling scheme, has blamed faulty machines on the strain placed on them during peak tourism periods while encouraging people to use collection points at retail outlets to avoid queues.

In a wide-ranging interview with Times of Malta, fielding questions about user frustrations, BCRS Malta Ltd CEO Alan Meilak said the company’s infrastructure had been “stressed” as the country’s population swelled with tourists.

Emphasising that outside the summer months the malfunction rate for the machines was lower, estimating the current rate to be “very low”, Meilak said this was not the case in the high season.

“When you go to summer, when the machines are really being hit... last August, we were reaching even over a million containers every day; that’s no joke,” he said.

“For a population that, with tourism, goes up to 700,000 people in summer... Then, yes, we saw a bit of stress on the infrastructure”.

Responding to complaints of bottles being rejected despite reportedly being submitted to machines in good condition, Meilak said that, despite being cleaned “almost every day”, dirt inside the machines could mean containers were being rejected.

He added that an anti-fraud system “did not help user experience” but said it was necessary to protect the scheme, pointing to “clever” and even “dangerous” fraud attempts in the past.

Addressing complaints of long queues, Meilak encouraged people to turn to collection points – without reverse vending machines – at supermarkets and retail outlets instead, stressing that if these were used more, long queues at machines would disappear.

“We would like to have more machines but first we need to address the root cause: that the retail outlet collection equates to only 10% of the collection,” he said. “Just imagine if this doubles, triples or quadruples – the load on the machines will automatically vanish.”

Shops offering the service issue 10c refunds to clients and are in turn paid 12c per container by BCRS when it collects them from the establishment. While acknowledging that some outlets did not have enough space to store large numbers of containers, Meilak said others did: “I would like to reach out to those retailers that have space to offer the service to the public.”

Meilak may face some blowback from retailers who say they have had enough of the scheme. A shop in Qormi, for instance, said last May it would no longer accept BCRS returns, calling the terms and conditions “a total ripoff”.

Vouchers

Turning to unredeemed vouchers, which Environment Minister Miriam Dalli said in parliament last week were worth €2 million, Meilak said most were still available for redemption.

He said a “relatively small” number of vouchers had remained unredeemed, with €1.7 million worth of vouchers still available to be redeemed, equivalent to 85%. Asked whether the 12-month expiry window for vouchers should be extended or abolished altogether, the BCRS head said this was the maximum and most common duration seen in other deposit refund schemes across Europe.

Losses

Quizzed on BCRS’s finances, Meilak said last year the company made “no profits, zero”, instead running losses of “over a million euros”,  which, he said, was one reason why the company had not invested in new collection machines.

As a not-for-profit company, BCRS is obligated to reinvest all profits in the company.

Last year follows a similar performance to that of 2022, when the company reported losses of €1.4 million, according to its financial statements for that year. Those losses are primarily due to repayments of loans the company took on at its inception to purchase machinery and equipment.

Asked when BCRS would file its financial records for last year, Meilak said they were “being audited and eventually will be submitted like a normal private company”. Private companies have until the end of this month to file their financial statements online.

Finances proved a hot topic during the interview. Quizzed on a 10c penalty fee bar owners told Times of Malta they were being charged for rejected containers in addition to not receiving their 10c deposit back, Meilak denied the charge had been introduced.

“There were discussions that this would be introduced but has it been introduced? No, we’re not charging it,” he said.

“The idea of the 10 cents fine is not to get money; it’s to deter people from sending us things that shouldn’t be sent,” said Meilak, pointing to deodorant cans and sun lotion bottles as examples of things sent to BCRS by establishment owners.

One Sliema bar owner told Times of Malta he was losing around €4,000 annually to the scheme, citing fines, unreturned container deposits and BCRS bag charges of €3.20 per bag, the price of which Meilak said was to cover collection services.

Establishments receive 25 free bags per month and purchase additional ones, with some owners saying they regularly buy around 80 per month, equivalent to about €3,000 per year.

Secrets

Small importers and producers told Times of Malta they were concerned about the amount of information they are being asked to hand over to BCRS, which counts representatives from Farsons, Marsovin and General Soft Drinks among its directors. They said they were uneasy with sharing a breakdown of their sales by category and even flavour of drink to a company they argue represents their biggest competitors.

One producer and importer said he had been approached with a buy-out offer from one of the companies represented on the BCRS board soon after the scheme started. Another said one of the companies had started directly competing with him on one of his products.

Rejecting the allegations, Meilak stressed that “any data received by BCRS is kept confidential... in a black box [a term for something that produces results without the user being able to see or understand how it works] and no one has access to it”.

He added that, with the company scanning all the barcodes of bottles passing through the scheme, “the data would be there just the same”.

Rejects

Responding to frustrated establishments that told Times of Malta they were regularly seeing rejection rates of around 15% while not being given explanations for why containers were rejected – with possible reasons including ripped labels or crushed containers – the BCRS chief said the information was available “on request”.

“If the barcode is slightly ripped, we will do our best to manually try to have the machine accept it. But if you send me a broken glass bottle with no label, don’t expect us to be in a position to understand what that bottle is,” he said.

“We try to make sure that, if possible, the 10 cents are given back. When we really don’t manage it’s because we can’t do it.”

However, Meilak said that, regardless of whether a container was rejected, it was still being recycled, something also true for those outside the scheme, such as wine bottles: “If it’s glass, we need to do something with it.”

Recycling

At the moment, BCRS “collect, sort and export” the bottles. With Malta shipping recycling waste abroad at an additional carbon cost, are there any plans to recycle locally?

Calling glass the “biggest polluter”, Meilak said the company was currently “seeing what we can do locally”, including exploring collaborations with universities. “I really hope we can find usage of glass here locally in Malta.”

Asked if BCRS would gain access to Wasteserv’s new glass sorting facility, which, in the last few months, it said helped it recycle 3,000 tonnes, Meilak said the company was “discussing all options available to us”.