International Review of Waste Management Policy - Department of ...

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� Deposit refund schemes can reduce the prevalence of litter;
� Issues associated with cross-border purchases need to be considered in
scheme design. This is likely to be important in the Irish context, not least as a
consequence of recent exchange rate movements;
� An appropriate labelling scheme or other system may be to deal with free
riders;
� Refillable containers may lead to greater distances being travelled for
returning bottles, so requiring refillables to be used may lead to claims that
the market is being structured in such a way as to place imported goods at a
disadvantage; and
� There is little clear information regarding what the costs of scheme
implementation might be in the Irish context. Views appear to be polarised
regarding the costs of introducing such a scheme, and few studies from the
available literature would appear to enable one to confidently assert that the
approach incurs costs well above the additional benefits which might be
derived. There are, however, indications that such schemes would need to be
designed with great care to ensure costs were aligned with the hoped for
benefits.
16.14 Prerequisites for Introduction
One sensitivity that any state system in Europe needs to take into consideration is the
issue of free trade. The OECD reports that deposit-refund systems will create barriers
to trade: 373
� if the initial deposits are high compared to the value of the goods;
� if foreign producers see that the costs of participating in a co-operative
retrieval and recycling scheme are out of proportion to their market share;
� if non-refillable containers are an important condition for the competitiveness
of imports;
� if they are applied only to certain types of containers or packaging which are
primarily used for imported products; or
� if they are applied in a fashion which is discriminatory or which unduly favours
domestic products.
As well as governmental resolve to force industry to accept the extra costs that
deposit refund schemes will entail, sufficient infrastructural provision is necessary to
cope with increased / altered collection and reprocessing requirements. As stated
above, this has also been a key concern within Europe: 374
373 OECD (1993) Applying Economic Instruments to Packaging Waste: Practical Issues for Product
Charges and Deposit Refund Systems, Paris: OECD.
374 European Commission (2009) Communication from the Commission on Beverage packaging,
deposit systems and the free movement of goods, C(2009) 3447 final Brussels 8 th May 2009.
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