Last week, FERVER President, Ulrich Ix, participated in the Resource Recovery Summit in Bucharest. Speaking in the session ‘The Business of Circularity — From Waste to Value’, he highlighted the contribution of glass recycling in Europe to the circular economy, both, from an economic as well as from a sustainability perspective.
He confirmed that introducing a DRS system in countries with very low or inefficient glass collection rates can be a way to quickly increase volumes. A good example is Romania where the volume collected doubled within a short period of time. In this case FERVER provides support.
However experience in other countries shows that the retrospective introduction of a DRS despite a well-functioning conventional glass collection system – such as the bottle bank collection – can ruin the market for glass packaging and lead to a shift towards other types of packaging for purely economic reasons. In this case a DRS is not advisable.
The unbeatable advantages of glass as a packaging material – particularly the fact that it can be recycled an infinite number of times without any loss of quality and that it does not interact with the contents in any way (a health consideration!) – speak for themselves.”