The Employers’ Organisation Council of Entrepreneurs has appealed to Prime Minister Donald Tusk to suspend the operation of Poland’s deposit return system, audit its effects, assess its environmental effectiveness and stop work on plans to include additional types of packaging in the scheme. In a special letter to the head of government, the organisation’s president, Adam Abramowicz, argues that the system is functioning very poorly and is creating problems and costs for both businesses and consumers. According to the former spokesperson for small and medium-sized enterprises, the system also generates additional CO2 emissions, which contradicts the main objective of its introduction: environmental protection.
“Six months have passed since the deposit return system was introduced in Poland. Before its launch, we repeatedly addressed Minister Paulina Hennig-Kloska and the Prime Minister, raising specific objections to the draft legislation, and later to its implementation and operation. However, our voice, as well as the objections of other organisations, were not taken into account. We only received reassurances from the Ministry of Climate and Environment that everything was under control and that the system was functioning without reservations. Unfortunately, reality looks completely different,” reads the letter from the Employers’ Organisation Council of Entrepreneurs.
Adam Abramowicz, president of the Council of Entrepreneurs, points out that media reports increasingly describe how the deposit return system is making everyday life more difficult for Polish consumers and generating unjustified costs for the economy. He also argues that representatives of the Ministry of Climate and Environment, when asked by journalists for specific data on the system — for example, the total amount of deposits that have not been refunded — respond that they do not yet know and will only be able to provide such figures after the end of 2026. In his view, this shows that the ministry has not implemented tools allowing it to monitor the system’s costs and effectiveness on an ongoing basis.
“It therefore appears,” adds Dominik Marczyk, president of the Chamber of the Municipal Sector, “that the creators of the Polish deposit return system do not know how much Polish consumers have paid in deposits, how much has not been returned, how much the entire system costs, or how much money has so far gone to the system operators.”
In their letter to the Prime Minister, entrepreneurs affiliated with the Employers’ Organisation Council of Entrepreneurs present their assessment of the deposit return system after six months of operation. Their conclusions are highly critical and, according to the organisation, should be treated as a warning signal.
Retailers point to operational, sanitary and settlement problems
The situation from the perspective of retail businesses is described by Marek Theus, president of the management board of MerCo Sp. z o.o., the owner of a grocery store chain in the Tricity area. He argues that not every package marked with a deposit label is accepted by the operator’s system. As a result, cashiers are often unsure whether they can accept a given container unless they check it manually through a dedicated application or through the integration of the POS system with the operator’s database.
According to Theus, if a package carries the “deposit” mark but its code is not included on the operator’s whitelist, responsibility for accepting it effectively falls on the cashier. He also points to logistical and sanitary problems. In his opinion, storing used packaging in grocery stores significantly interferes with sanitary and epidemiological rules applicable to food retailers, because in practice it combines a food sales outlet with a waste collection point.
Theus also highlights frequent problems with settlements, payment bottlenecks and frozen funds. The system requires additional work related to accepting, storing, transferring and settling returned packaging. This translates into higher service costs, while manual collection at the checkout slows down customer service and blocks regular sales.
Waste management companies warn about the weakening of existing recycling infrastructure
Entrepreneurs from the waste management sector also have many objections to the way the deposit return system operates. Dominik Marczyk, president of the Chamber of the Municipal Sector, notes that there is currently demand on the market for secondary raw materials sorted from waste originating, among other sources, from households. He adds that modern Polish companies have advanced technologies that allow them to recover more materials for recycling.
According to Marczyk, however, the deposit return system means that the most valuable raw materials are being taken over by the system’s operators. This weakens the use of modern recycling and sorting installations that are already operating in Poland. He stresses that these facilities were built for the source-segregated waste collection system that has been functioning in Poland for around 15 years.
Marczyk argues that these modern waste processing installations were financed, in effect, by society — through domestic and EU subsidies, as well as part of the funds paid by municipalities to contractors for waste collection and management services. In his opinion, the deposit return system reduces the potential of these installations and means that the expenditure incurred on them may never pay off.
Entrepreneurs warn of higher municipal waste costs
The authors of the letter argue that this situation has a direct impact on the cost of living for Polish households. They write that if valuable raw materials disappear from the waste stream currently collected in yellow bags or containers, and only the difficult and expensive residual fraction remains, waste processing installations will have to shift costs onto municipalities in order to obtain additional funds.
According to the Employers’ Organisation Council of Entrepreneurs, this trend is already visible. The organisation claims that the introduction of the deposit return system is contributing to sharp increases in waste collection fees across Poland. At the same time, it argues that the main beneficiaries of the deposit system are the largest food and beverage companies placing drinks on the market in single-use PET packaging.
Environmental benefits questioned
The organisation also questions whether the system is meeting its main stated objective: environmental protection. The authors of the letter argue that the current regulations lead to a significant increase in the carbon footprint by transporting waste through an alternative collection system. They also point to the transport of uncrushed bottles, which means that a large share of the transported volume is effectively air.
The letter also draws attention to fuel consumption connected with residents driving to reverse vending machines or other collection points. In the opinion of the entrepreneurs, these factors should be taken into account when assessing the real environmental balance of the deposit return system.
Call for suspension and audit
Adam Abramowicz argues that the Council of Entrepreneurs was right to warn last year that the deposit return system, in the formula proposed by the Ministry of Climate and Environment, was premature, insufficiently prepared, costly and ineffective. He says the organisation warned that its implementation would cause organisational chaos and increase the burden on both entrepreneurs and consumers.
According to Abramowicz, these warnings have been confirmed. He claims that residents are already paying a high price for the introduction of the deposit return system and that these costs will continue to rise. For this reason, the Employers’ Organisation Council of Entrepreneurs is asking the Prime Minister to suspend the system, conduct an audit of its impact on businesses and consumers, analyse its effectiveness in protecting the environment and stop work on expanding it to include additional packaging categories.
Source: Managerplus.pl
