Romania's SGR deposit-refund system is a project that has already proven to be quite efficient and help the economy, but also future generations, have a cleaner Romania, Minister of the Environment, Waterways and Forestry Mircea Fechet said on Tuesday.
"I would like to talk about a specific project that I discuss every time I have the opportunity. And it is a project that not only helps our economy, not only helps create new jobs, but it is an environmental project that helps future generations have a cleaner Romania. The project I will talk about is the deposit-refund system in Romania, which was recently established. It's been less than a year since it started, on December 1st last year, but it's a project that has already proven to be quite effective because, if you had come to Romania two or ten years ago, of course you would have seen a lot of beautiful things, but at the same time you would probably have noticed huge quantities of PET bottles thrown maybe into our rivers, maybe in our lakes, near the roads or in nature, generally speaking. So, what has happened is that if you were to make the same trip now, one of the things that you're going to notice is that the PET bottles are gone, and that means we've done our job. Therefore, SGR in Romania is expected to manage almost 7 billion PET bottles, glass bottles and aluminium cans every year," Fechet told a workshop on sustainable culture, circular economy, interdisciplinary approaches for the future, organised by the European Network for Sustainable Development.
The minister reiterated that the second billion PETs collected was reached and that the return rate was 81% in September, compared to 78% in August.
"And we're talking about a country where, if we talk about the amount of waste that we collect separately, it's around 12, 13, maybe 14 percent, which is very, very low. So, since we are talking about future generations, of course we have to talk about the things we have left behind and the environment is really something that must be left at least as we found it."
Fechet added that the project also helped create thousands of new jobs, being "an example of a situation in which, when you have enough political support and when you have enough will, you can do great things and you can implement big projects."
According to RetuRo, the administrator of the SGR system, over 81% of the packaging with the "SGR" logo was returned by consumers in September, up from78% in August. Thus, last month, consumers returned 453 million waste packaging items.
In total, 2.32 billion waste packaging items were returned from December 2023 to September 2024, and since the system was implemented in Romania, approximately 144,000 tonnes of packaging waste have been handed over by RetuRO to recyclers, ensuring the reintegration of materials for the manufacture of new packaging, according to the bottle-to-bottle principle.
Currently, RetuRo has an extensive infrastructure, with seven regional counting and sorting centres already operational, located in the counties of Prahova (Aricetii Rahtivani), Dolj (Almaj), Bacau (Nicolae Balcescu), Brasov, Cluj (Bontida), Ilfov (Otopeni) and Timis (Giarmata).
RetuRo Sistem Garantie Returnare S.A. is a non-profit company established by a consortium of three private shareholders: the Association of Romania's Brewers for the Environment (30%), the Association of Producers of Soft Drinks for Sustainability (30%) and the Association of Retailers for the Environment (20%) and a public shareholder, the Romanian government, through the central environmental authority, the Ministry of the Environment, Waterways and Forestry (20%).