For the past two-and-a-half years, consumers have had to pay an extra 10c for almost every drink bottle or can they buy.
They then need to carry that beverage container to a machine and deposit it to get their money back. It’s a hassle. It’s frustrating. It also works.
The Beverage Container Recycling Scheme, or BCRS, demands something of citizens. As a result, Malta went from recycling a fraction of its beverage containers to more than 80% of them, in just a couple of years.
Looming EU recycling targets meant the government was effectively forced to introduce the system. But its immediate impact is proof that both carrots and sticks are needed to drive quick and effective behavioural change.
Malta’s government is notoriously reluctant to do anything that could be construed as punitive. Instead, it tries to fix big-picture problems – from traffic to overly dense construction – by focusing on solely positive solutions.
That is all well and good but, sometimes, people need a prod to get moving. Few things are as effective at doing that as reaching into their pockets.
The operator should be commended for the way it got things running nationwide from day one. And the government deserves praise for having introduced the scheme at the risk of being unpopular.
That is not to say everything about the BCRS is worth celebrating.
There is a lack of transparency surrounding the scheme and that fuels significant suspicion about the scheme’s operators.
In an interview with Times of Malta, BCRS’ CEO said the company is posting losses – something it is hard to comment on, given its accounts for 2023 remain elusive – and struggling to cope with demand in peak months.
That glosses over the fact that BCRS enjoys a captive market with no competition and that its regulator, Circular Economy Malta, seems to adopt a very hands-off approach. CE Malta has not published an annual report in two years and seems content to allow the operator to manage the scheme as it sees fit.
As a result, pressure on BCRS to improve the scheme comes from those customers themselves, rather than the regulator.
Seeing people, especially senior citizens, waste hours just to recycle their bottles due to a subpar network of machines is unacceptable. CE Malta should be doing more to hold BCRS’s feet to the fire.
BCRS may well argue that CE Malta’s relative invisibility is more of a hindrance than a help. After all, it is CE Malta, not the operator, that must ensure cowboy retailers and caterers do not abuse the scheme and hog consumer retail machines. We see no sign of it doing so.
Both could also do more to reassure and protect small beverage importers. The operator says that market data on bottle returns – data that would be very valuable to its big fish shareholders – is held in a ‘black box’. We must take their word for it.
That is without delving into the considerable red tape the scheme imposes on such operators, who are obliged to register each individual product and provide BCRS with a sample of each.
Given their relatively minuscule market share, legislators might consider following the examples of Denmark and Sweden, which both exempt small-scale beverages from their recycling schemes.
Their inclusion in Malta’s scheme is especially puzzling when one considers that containers for far more popular beverages, such as wines, long-life milk and fruit juices, are not part of the BCRS.
Exempting the small fry while requiring all the high-volume beverages to be part of the scheme would drive recycling rates higher while reducing the cost of doing business for SMEs.