The new Beverage Container Refund Scheme (BCRS) announced on Monday it has reached the one million bottles deposited mark, but since the scheme was launched a week ago it seems to have had an equal number of complaints.

The scheme has been controversial since its conception, but with its launch on 14 November some have welcomed it while a growing number of others are labelling it a mere greenwash and an economic and environmental scam effectively forcing a 10-cent tax on every beverage in a plastic receptacle people buy.

The scheme’s directors are Malta’s largest beverage companies and include representatives of Farsons, Marsovin and General Soft Drinks, among others.

A 10-cent charge is being placed on each and every such beverage, which is passed on to the consumer when it is purchased. Once consumed, the used plastic container can be put, in its pristine state if it is to be accepted, into one of BCRS’ Reverse Vending Machines, and consumers receive not their 10 cents back but, instead, a voucher for 10 cents that can be redeemed only under certain conditions.

Moreover, many people are often finding the Reverse Vending Machines full to the brim and unable to accept more bottles once they do get to them. Others consumers still have found the machines not only difficult to find but cumbersome and complicated to use.

The fact of the matter is that each time someone does not feel like going through the laborious process, they have effectively been taxed the 10 cents tacked onto their drink’s retail price.

That, coupled with the inherent difficulties of using the machines, has led critics to accuse the BCRS system of having been designed to fail, and possibly for good reason.

The scheme’s one-million-bottles-in-a-week figure works out to refunds, in the form of vouchers, of €100,000 over seven days. But it could very well be the millions more of unreturned bottles that the scheme’s operators are more interested in.

According to the scheme’s many detractors, that is precisely what those behind it are banking on: people not bothering to return the bottles and the 10 cents per receptacle ending up back in the pockets of the drinks manufacturers and importers.

And it appears to be a win-win situation for those behind the scheme because the bottles that are returned, since no local recycling facilities are involved in the scheme, are exported to unknown destinations for recycling, again, at a profit, or otherwise, it is also being speculated, to simply be dumped in a foreign landfill far from Malta.

An intentionally difficult system?

It is argued the scheme appears designed to disincentivise the public’s participation.

While BCRS said on Monday it plans to install more Reverse Vending Machines, over and above the 320 it says went live on 14 November – although figures tabled in parliament on Tuesday show a total of 274 – there are numerous complaints from consumers about their sparsity and that, when they do get to them, the machines are often full and unable to accept deposits.

Others still have been finding the machines complicated to use and are frustrated over the number of vouchers the machines issue, one per bottle deposited, which makes it a lengthier and more cumbersome process.

And there are more problems still once consumers go to cash in their 10-cent vouchers. One cannot simply get cash back for their vouchers as they instead need to be deducted from the bill at a retail shop in which beverages are sold.

That is in the case of vouchers issued by public Reverse Vending Machines.

If, on the other hand, the vouchers are issued from machines located at a supermarket, they can only be redeemed against a bill from that particular supermarket or at one of the other outlets in the same chain should that be the case.

While it is more than apparent that many people out there are simply not bothering to engage with the scheme and are simply disposing of their plastic drink receptacles as before with their recycling, social media has been rife with tales of people collecting those bottles from residential garbage bags.

They are, however, being disappointed and turned away from the machines because bottles cannot be accepted unless they are perfectly intact. As BCRS makes clear, “the beverage container needs to be returned empty and in good condition, with its shape still intact and barcode clearly readable, ideally with the cap on to maximise recycling”.

A chequered origin

The scheme’s shareholders count among them the country’s biggest bottlers and drink importers, who all stand to gain one way or another even though they have invested €17 million into the system.

The scheme’s shareholders are Charles Grech & Co Limited, The General Soft Drinks Company Limited, Simonds Farsons Cisk and GSD Marketing Limited, which all own a small 0.0853 per cent share in the enterprise.

The larger shareholdings (of 33.2194 per cent each) are held by the Malta Beverage Importers Association (whose directors include representatives of Charles Grech Limited, Nestle Malta and P. Cutajar & Co. Ltd), the Malta Beverage Producers Association (whose directors include representatives of Farsons and Marsovin), and the Malta Beverage Retailers Association (whose directors include representatives of the Malta Chamber of SMEs and of a number of large supermarkets).

The scheme, however, has a more chequered origin story, with it having been first conceived by the business partner of former OPM chief of staff Keith Schembri, Malcolm Scerri.

The bottle return system had first been announced seemingly out of the blue by then prime minister Joseph Muscat in 2017 in his speech marking the first 100 days of that legislature. He pledged at the time that 70% of Malta’s bottles would be recycled by 2019.

Scerri, through a company he owned and directed – was the Malta representative of Tomra, a Norwegian multinational recycling solutions corporation.

Scerri’s company was set up in May 2014, well before Muscat’s announcement that the government was looking into a plastic bottle return system, but over a year after the Labour Party was swept to power in March 2013.

Scerri was at the time involved in a number of companies, all of which were registered at either Schembri’s Kasco premises or his personal address. But Acumen, the company that was once in the running for the contract, was actually registered at the office address of Nexia BT of Panama Papers-Mossack Fonseca fame and in which its head, Brian Tonna, had been heavily implicated.

The firm housed Mossack-Fonseca Malta before the company left the country in the wake of the scandal. It had also engineered the overseas financial machinations of Minister Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri.

Schembri and Scerri were also revealed in the Panama Papers as having had companies in the British Virgin Islands. Scerri had taken over the management of Schembri’s Malta-based Kasco Ltd and Kasco Engineering when Schembri was appointed the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff in March 2013.

Source: The Times of Malta

A December 2015 email leaked in the Panama Papers showed Schembri, as well as former minister Konrad Mizzi, had intended to use his Panama company as a holding or operational company investing or operating in the area of recycling, among other areas of operation.

They also said the ‘target companies’ of that recycling business would be the now-infamous 17 Black, owned by Yorgen Fenech, and Macbridge, owned by the mother-in-law of Enemalta and Montenegro wind farm negotiator, Chinese national Chen Cheng.