New Zealand faces an important choice about the future of glass packaging.
The question is whether producers continue to foist the financial burden for recovery and recycling of packaging on local authorities or whether they will be required to take greater responsibility for materials they place on the market. The horse has bolted globally, as from Europe to Australia producers finance recovery of their packaging.
For New Zealand, the question is whether glass, which is lobbying to stay out of a future deposit return scheme and obligate local councils to incur further expense though a dedicated glass-only kerbside bin, will be included in a well-designed container return scheme or possibly left to face a more expensive and less effective regulatory pathway.
Glass remains one of the most recyclable and reusable packaging materials available. Recovered glass can be made into new bottles repeatedly, reducing demand for virgin materials, energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. Glass bottles, over all other materials, are also ideally suited to refill and reuse.
In 2024, around 70 per cent of glass was collected, meaning nearly one-third was lost to landfill or litter. More importantly, only about 46 per cent of the glass placed on the market was recycled back into new bottles. Much of the remainder was downcycled into aggregate or other low-value uses.
Glass is also increasingly expensive for councils and ratepayers to collect. The annual cost of kerbside glass recycling has been estimated at approximately $55 million, while the glass industry’s financial contribution is isolated to small grants and about 0.5% of this cost.
Glass also damages sorting equipment and contaminates other recyclable materials, reducing their value. Unlike aluminium, recovered glass frequently represents a cost rather than a source of revenue for councils.
The experience of a glass-only kerbside service in Victoria should serve as a warning. Councils there have strongly resisted a mandatory glass-only bin because of its expense and duplication with the state’s container deposit scheme. The vast majority of Victorian councils have now simply refused to establish this service and the opposition Liberal party have pledged to dump it if elected in State elections in November this year.
New Zealand should avoid expanding an expensive parallel collection system when a container return scheme can recover clean, source-separated glass while not imposing further expenses on already stretched ratepayers and councils.
Glass is facing growing competition from aluminium and plastic. These materials are lighter, less prone to breakage and generally cheaper to transport and store. They can also attract lower producer-responsibility costs, particularly where fees are calculated according to packaging weight and collection expenses.
The United Kingdom illustrates the danger of glass seeking exemption from deposit return. The British glass industry successfully argued for its exclusion from the deposit scheme, only for glass to be captured under the country’s packaging extended producer responsibility system. Glass producers consequently face some of the highest EPR fees because glass is heavy and costly to collect and process and manufacturers are switching materials to avoid such costs.
Excluding glass from a New Zealand container return scheme could produce the same result. Glass would remain dependent on lower-quality kerbside collection, face potentially higher producer-responsibility fees and lose ground to competing materials collected efficiently through the deposit system.
Including glass in a deposit scheme would instead deliver higher return rates, cleaner material, less colour contamination and better-quality cullet for bottle-to-bottle recycling. It would provide greater confidence for investment in domestic glass processing and reduce the incentive for beverage producers to switch materials simply to lower their regulatory costs.
Importantly also, container return infrastructure can provide the foundation for the revival of refillable packaging.
New Zealand once commonly used returnable beer, soft-drink and milk bottles. A recent returnable beer-bottle pilot by Steinlager in NZ, shows that reuse is not merely a nostalgic idea. It is a practical opportunity for the future of glass.
Successful reuse requires consumers to return containers consistently, along with convenient collection points and logistics capable of moving empty bottles back to fillers. A container return scheme creates precisely these conditions. It develops public return behaviour and establishes nationwide infrastructure that can support both recycling and reuse.
The glass industry can try and continue resisting reform, defending a system financed by councils and even adding further to it. Alternately, it can embrace producer responsibility as an opportunity to improve collection, strengthen domestic recycling and build a reusable packaging system.
Including glass in New Zealand’s future container return scheme is therefore not a threat to the glass industry. It is the strongest available strategy for protecting its competitiveness and relevance in an increasingly circular packaging economy.