The Environment Minister Concedes the Volta Deposit Scheme Has Problems, Starting With the People Emptying Recycling Bins for the 10-Cent Refund

Five months after Portugal switched on its deposit-return scheme for drinks containers, the minister responsible for it has publicly acknowledged that it is not working as designed, and has named the problem that has come to define it in Lisbon: people opening kerbside recycling bins to fish out bottles and cans worth 10 cents each.

Maria da Graça Carvalho, the Minister for the Environment and Energy, spoke to Portuguese journalists in Brussels on Tuesday 1 September after meetings at the European Commission. She said problems with the rollout of the Sistema Volta (Volta System) had been identified, that some were already fixed, and that others were being handled case by case. "We are in a transition process," she said. "We hope to resolve all the problems."

What the minister actually conceded

Her account, carried by the Lusa news agency, breaks into four admissions.

The first is about large events. Festivals and big gatherings were the earliest failure point, she said, and that one she considers solved. The second is the bin picking. The government is studying the placement of dedicated containers next to existing waste-deposit points, so that returnable packaging has somewhere to go that is not the general recycling bin. The third is the hospitality trade: talks are under way with the restaurant, cafe and hotel sector, which has struggled with the mechanics of taking containers back over a counter. The fourth is the simplest and the most expensive. There are not enough machines.

"Part of the problems identified result from the absence of points where consumers can hand in the packaging," the minister said, arguing for more reverse vending machines and, in particular, for larger units rather than the small ones that fill up and stop accepting containers.

On enforcement, she was careful to spread the responsibility. Inspection, she said, is shared between SDR Portugal, the non-profit association that manages the Sistema de Depósito e Reembolso (Deposit and Refund System), and the municipalities, which own the bins and run household waste collection. She also called for councils to be more involved in deciding where machines go and in monitoring how the system runs.

The bin miners

The Portuguese press has given the phenomenon a name: mineiros do lixo, or rubbish miners. The Diário de Notícias, which coined the phrase, reported that the PSP has detained a first individual and that Lisbon City Council wants clean-up operations co-financed by the scheme. Residents in central Lisbon parishes have photographed people tipping the contents of yellow recycling containers onto the pavement to sort out the returnable items.

It is worth being precise about why this is happening, because it is not a malfunction. Before April, the plastic bottle in a recycling bin was worth nothing to a passer-by. Since April it has been worth 10 cents, redeemable in cash or a shopping voucher at any participating machine. The scheme did not accidentally create a street trade in used packaging; it created a price, and a price is what a street trade needs. Germany's Pfand system has supported an informal collection economy for two decades on exactly the same logic.

What is unusual in Portugal is that the price arrived before the infrastructure. When we reported in July that the scheme had passed 100 million containers while Lisbon City Hall demanded it be scrapped, the complaint from the council was already about street cleaning rather than about recycling rates. By the time the scheme became mandatory in August at 150 million containers, the number of return points had not kept pace with the number of people looking for them.

How the system works, for anyone who has not used it

The Sistema Volta went live in April 2026. It covers single-use beverage packaging up to three litres: plastic bottles, aluminium and steel cans. A deposit of 10 cents is added to the shelf price of each container and returned to the consumer when the empty is handed in at a collection point, normally an automated machine in or beside a supermarket. Glass is outside the scheme. The deposit is not a tax and not a fee: it is your money, held until you return the packaging.

If you are new to Portuguese waste rules more broadly, our guide to the ecoponto colour codes, the brown biowaste bin and where to drop oil and batteries sets out what goes where.

The 200 million euro number, explained

The minister justified the whole exercise with a figure: Portugal paid roughly 200 million euros last year for plastic that was not recycled, and roughly 600 million over the last three years.

That number deserves unpacking, because it is routinely described in Portuguese coverage as a fine and it is not one. Since 1 January 2021 every EU member state pays a contribution into the European Union budget calculated at 0.80 euros per kilogram of plastic packaging waste that is not recycled, under the own-resources decision that funded the post-pandemic recovery package. It is a budget contribution, assessed on statistics that member states themselves report, and it falls as the recycling rate rises. Portugal's bill is large because its plastic packaging recycling rate is not.

That also sets the honest test for the Sistema Volta. A container that is returned to a machine only reduces the bill if it would otherwise have gone to landfill or incineration. A bottle diverted from the yellow ecoponto, where it was already being recycled, into a reverse vending machine changes the route without changing the outcome. The bin picking is a nuisance for councils, but its cost to the national recycling rate is close to nothing, because those bottles were already in the recycling stream. The containers that matter are the ones that were going into the general waste bin, or onto the ground.

Why Portugal has to run this at all

Carvalho framed the scheme as unavoidable: "It is a European system that will be mandatory in all European countries, and we were the 18th country to implement it. In all of them, at the start, there were disturbances."

The legal basis is the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, which became applicable across the bloc in August. It requires member states to collect 90 percent of single-use plastic and metal beverage containers up to three litres separately by 2029, and to set up a deposit-return system if they cannot hit that figure another way. Portugal, well short of 90 percent, was never going to hit it another way. The choice the government made was about timing, not about whether.

The wider waste picture is the same story at larger scale: the government's own Terra+ strategy mobilised 2.3 billion euros to steady the country's waste crisis through 2030, with a third of the national landfill network near capacity.

What this means for foreign residents

• Your deposit is refundable, and it is worth collecting. A household getting through two dozen bottles and cans a week is leaving around 125 euros a year in the bin. Keep the empties intact: crushed containers and missing barcodes are the most common reasons a machine rejects them.
• Do not put returnable containers in the yellow ecoponto. That is what has turned kerbside bins into a target. If you cannot reach a machine, the deposit is simply forfeited, and the container is more likely to end up on the pavement than in a recycling plant.
• Expect the machine map to change. The minister has committed to more units and to larger ones. If your nearest machine is chronically full, that is precisely the failure mode the government says it is addressing, and it is worth reporting to the retailer rather than assuming it is normal.
• Cafes and small shops are still adjusting. Talks with the hospitality sector are ongoing, so a small establishment that sells you a canned drink may not yet be equipped to take the empty back. That is a transition problem, not a refusal of your rights.
• If you run a business that sells drinks, the obligations sit with you as of August, when participation stopped being voluntary. The enforcement split between SDR Portugal and your local council means the inspector who turns up may come from either side.

The government's proposed fix, dedicated containers beside existing bins so that returnables are not mixed into the recycling stream, is a reasonable piece of design. It is also an admission that the scheme was launched without one. Whether it arrives before the winter, and whether the machines arrive with it, is now the test that matters for a system Portugal cannot abandon and has not yet made work.