Austria's Bottle Deposit Scheme Explained: How the 25-Cent System Works

Since 1 January 2025, almost every single-use plastic bottle and every drinks can sold in Austria has carried an extra 25 cents — refunded when you bring the empty container back. A year and a half on, the initial confusion at the tills has largely settled into routine. Yet the same questions keep cropping up in everyday life: which bottles actually carry a deposit and which don't? Where do I return the empties? And what happens if the label is missing? This article explains the system step by step — and takes a sober first look at the results.

What the deposit is for — and where it comes from

Austria's deposit on single-use containers is not a national solo effort but part of an EU-wide approach. The European Union's Single-Use Plastics Directive requires 90 per cent of single-use plastic drinks bottles to be collected separately by 2029 (Directive (EU) 2019/904, Article 9). Before the deposit, only around 70 per cent of all single-use plastic bottles were collected in Austria (oesterreich.gv.at, updated 1 January 2026). According to the system operator, collection rates as high as the EU demands are only achieved in countries with deposit systems. Austria — like Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltic states before it — has chosen this route.

Two goals take priority. First, high-quality recycling: people who return bottles sorted by type deliver clean material that can be turned into new bottles. Second, less littering — the careless discarding of rubbish in the countryside. A can worth 25 cents is less likely to end up in a roadside ditch; that is the basic idea. The system is run by the central body EWP Recycling Pfand Österreich; it is owned by an association that all producers and take-back points can join, and the environment ministry has extensive rights of participation and oversight. The logic is similar to efforts to cut food waste at home: small everyday routines that add up to large quantities.

How much deposit, on which packaging

The deposit is a flat 25 cents per container, charged at purchase on top of the product price. When you return the empty container, you get the 25 cents back. The amount does not depend on size: a 0.5-litre bottle carries exactly the same deposit as a 1.5-litre one.

As a rule, the deposit applies to closed drinks containers made of plastic or metal with a capacity of 0.1 to 3 litres. That covers most typical drinks: mineral water, soft drinks, iced tea, energy drinks, many juices and canned beer. These containers can be recognised by the Austrian deposit logo (oesterreich.gv.at).

What is not covered

This is worth a closer look, because the exceptions cause confusion. Milk and milk-based mixed drinks are exempt for hygiene reasons, and so are syrups, because they are not intended for immediate consumption — so if you buy cow's milk in a plastic bottle, you pay no deposit. The deposit does, however, apply to all drink types as a rule; plant-based drinks such as oat or soy drinks are not named in the list of exemptions. The distinction isn't always intuitive and accounts for some of the questions at the checkout.

Also not covered are beverage cartons (the classic Tetra Pak packaging), drinks bottles made of glass or metal with plastic caps or lids, and bottles intended for baby food and for liquid foods for special medical purposes. Reusable glass bottles continue to run through their own, older deposit system and are not part of the new scheme.

Rule of thumb for everyday life: deposit logo on the container means deposit paid — and deposit back. If there's no logo, the packaging belongs in the separate recycling collection, not in the reverse vending machine.

How returns work

The principle is simple: every outlet that sells deposit-bearing single-use containers must also take them back — supermarkets, discounters, chemists, petrol stations and many smaller shops. In busy places such as shopping centres, stations or airports, several outlets can set up a shared return point close by. Larger shops have reverse vending machines that scan the logo and barcode and credit the deposit to a voucher. Smaller outlets without a machine accept bottles and cans by hand and pay out the deposit directly.

One detail often overlooked in daily life: for manual returns, an outlet only has to take back containers in its usual sales quantities and container sizes — this applies to bakeries, for example. So if you want to get rid of a big bag of mixed cans, you're better off heading to a machine. At vending machines you pay the deposit too, but you return the empty container at another outlet.

For a machine to accept a container, a few conditions must be met: the deposit logo and barcode must be clearly visible, the container must be empty and uncrushed, and the label must be present and legible. Squash a bottle or peel off the label, and you risk the machine rejecting it. There is a special rule for hospitality: restaurants, cafés, accommodation providers or snack stands from which drinks are not usually taken away do not have to charge a deposit for containers that stay on the premises, nor take anything back (oesterreich.gv.at).

The first results: target exceeded

After the first full year, the results are positive. According to Recycling Pfand Österreich, which presented the figures on 28 January 2026 together with environment minister Norbert Totschnig, the scheme reached a collection rate of 81.5 per cent in its first year — the deposit ordinance had set 80 per cent for 2025. In absolute terms: around two billion deposit bottles and cans were placed on the market in 2025, and 1.4 billion had come back by 31 December. In calculating the rate, the operator factors in the different weights of the containers and an average of 51 days between sale and return — drinks bought in December often only come back in the new year.

The infrastructure is in place, too: around 16,300 return points and more than 6,400 machines are in operation according to the operator, and 98 per cent of containers are returned via machines in shops (Recycling Pfand Österreich, 28 January 2026). On material quality, Recycling Pfand Österreich points to a recyclability of 99.5 per cent and a recycled content of more than 60 per cent across all single-use bottles placed on the market — since 2025 the EU has required at least 25 per cent recycled plastic in PET drinks bottles (Recycling Pfand Österreich, 23 March 2026). The next milestone is a 90 per cent collection rate by 2027, which would see Austria meet the EU requirement two years early (Province of Tyrol, 28 January 2026).

Where things still stick

For all the positive results, some friction remains. Anyone arriving at peak times may find a machine full or out of order. Drinks consumed in public spaces still often end up in litter bins rather than the deposit loop — which leads to people rummaging through bins to recover the deposit. And bottles and cans bought abroad without the Austrian deposit logo are not taken back by shops; they belong in the regular collection, such as the yellow bag.

All told, the deposit is one building block in a larger logic: it aims to pull packaging out of residual waste and the natural environment and feed it back into the loop as a clean raw material. How it fits with the other levers is shown in our look at the circular economy in everyday life. And anyone who thinks the deposit loop through to the end inevitably arrives at the most obvious option — avoiding plastic in everyday life from the outset, before a single-use bottle ever lands in the shopping trolley.