Bottle and Can Deposit: 10 and 15 Dinars Starting in 2027
Serbia would charge a deposit on bottles and cans starting in 2027 and refund it in full. The country recycles 15.45 percent of municipal waste, versus roughly 49 percent across the European Union.
Serbia’s bottle and can deposit would come in two amounts: 10 dinars (about EUR 0.09) for smaller packaging and 15 dinars (about EUR 0.13) for larger packaging, at an exchange rate of roughly 117 dinars to the euro. That money is not a cost but a deposit: it comes back in full the moment an empty bottle or can is returned to a designated collection point.
The Ministry of Environmental Protection has announced that the deposit refund system will start operating during 2027. Until now it was known only that the system was in preparation, not how much the deposit would be or in what order different types of packaging would enter the system.
The number behind the push is stark: Serbia recycles 15.45 percent of municipal waste, while the European Union average is around 49 percent. Only 28 percent of citizens have access to an organized recycling system, and 13.6 percent of waste ends up outside any system at all, in illegal dumps and in the open.
How would refunds work in stores?
A customer pays the deposit at checkout, on top of the price of the drink. The empty packaging is then returned at the point of sale, either through a reverse vending machine or by hand, depending on the size of the store. Small shops are not required to have a machine in order to take part.
Jelena Petljanski, president of the Alliance for Circular Packaging, describes the mechanism this way:
The consumer pays a deposit: for example, 10 dinars for smaller packaging, or 15 dinars for larger packaging. When the empty packaging is returned to the designated location, the deposit is refunded in full.
A dedicated nonprofit deposit organization would run the whole chain, handling logistics, financial flows and tracking of the packaging. The store is simply the point where the money goes back to the citizen.
Retailers play one of the key roles in how the system functions, because that is exactly where citizens return packaging and get their deposit back.
The rollout would happen in phases. The first covers PET packaging and cans, with glass and multilayer cardboard packaging following later.
Why the 80 percent target isn’t reachable without deposits
The collection rate targeted for PET packaging is 80 percent. The gap between that figure and the 28 percent of citizens who currently have access to organized recycling shows how much work remains. In European Union countries that have introduced deposit systems, collection rates pass 90 percent, and it is the only model that has crossed that line in practice.
The deadlines are already set. By 2030, Serbia is bound to European Union recycling targets for packaging waste:
- 85 percent for paper and cardboard
- 75 percent for glass
- 60 percent for aluminum
- 55 percent for plastic
Before that, national targets for 2029 call for 72 percent reuse and 65 percent recycling of packaging waste.
What stands in the way
A deposit on packaging is not new in Serbia, but so far it has been voluntary and incomplete. Some beverage producers already run their own returnable glass packaging with a deposit, though the amount varies from producer to producer and chain to chain, with no uniform national rules and no PET bottles or cans included at all. Those two materials make up the largest share of packaging waste.
The bigger obstacle is legal. The legislative changes needed to introduce the system have not yet been adopted, even though the announced start date is 2027. Between the adoption of the regulations and the first machine in a store lies equipment procurement, logistics contracts and the founding of the deposit organization itself, so every month the law is delayed shortens the timeline for industry, not for the state.
The next measurable step is not the size of the deposit but a date: adoption of the legislative changes and publication of a phased timeline, without which producers and retail chains cannot plan the capital investment needed for collection equipment.
