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Booze goes green

23 Aug 2020

  • 300 million bottles, 160 million cans
By Sarah Hannan
The Excise Department is to collaborate with the Central Environmental Authority (CEA), distilleries and brewery companies, and local retailers to introduce a recycling project to collect discarded bottles and cans that are causing severe environmental pollution every year. “The retailers will be encouraged to buy back empty bottles and cans and prompt consumers to return them for a higher deposit instead of tossing them with their garbage. The mechanism to collect and recycle empty bottles was considered following the many complaints directed at us from the public and environmental activists,” Deputy Excise Commissioner and Departmental Spokesman Kapila Kumarasinghe said. The CEA observed that about 300 million empty bottles of various sizes and 160 million metal cans are discarded into the environment annually, without a proper dumping mechanism. The liquor regulatory authority initiated the project to find a solution to reduce the pollution caused by the millions of empty alcohol bottles and cans being discarded irresponsibly. Kumarasinghe said that discussions were held between the CEA, Excise Department, as well as liquor industry stakeholders following the observations, and at present, a deposit is retained for a selected set of liquor bottles by the retailers by adding it to the Government-authorised price of that particular bottle. He elaborated that certain types of bottles are sold with a bottle deposit of around Rs. 40, which is added to the maximum retail price (MRP) of the bottle of liquor. “When the bottle is returned to the store, the deposit is paid back to the customer, or no bottle deposit is levied during the next purchase. With this new mechanism, we are looking at increasing this deposit levy, so that it would encourage the customers to bring the empty bottle to the retailer and have the deposit reimbursed.” Another mechanism will also be introduced where empty metal cans can be brought to the retailers where they can crush it with newly installed crushers before reselling it for scrap metal. Kumarasinghe added that the two beer manufacturing companies based in Sri Lanka have already expressed their willingness to supply alcohol retailers with crushers for this purpose.

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