In two and a half years, Romania has gone from one of the EU’s worst recycling performers to a country that made significant progress – writes Cristian Gherasim.
It is a rare Eastern European success story in a policy area long dominated by wealthier member states. But with collection being the easy part and industrial recycling capacity still lagging, the question Brussels is watching is whether Romania can turn a logistical win into a genuine circular economy — and whether the rest of the region can move fast enough to follow.
The engine behind that shift is Romania’s Deposit-Return Scheme (DRS), operated by RetuRO, a public-private partnership.
According to company data, the programme helped push the collection rate for beverage packaging to 83% in 2025 — a very good result contributing to the progress for a country that was ranking near the bottom of EU recycling statistics.
By volume, Romania’s DRS system is now the third largest in the EU after Germany and Poland, processing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of beverage packaging annually. Around 9 billion containers had been returned since the scheme began, according to RetuRO data presented at the Resource Recovery Summit held in Bucharest last month.
In Samurcasi, a village some 20 km from Bucharest, the same faces show up twice a week at the collection points, bags stuffed with empties. It has its own rhythm now, its own routine, without anyone really deciding it should. It just became the way things are done. And it’s working in ways nobody planned for. Streets are cleaner. Bottles that used to end up in streams after every rainstorm are going into machines instead. Small shifts, but you notice them.
The reason isn’t that people suddenly grew a conscience. The calculation just shifted. Once there was a financial reason to say yes, the habit followed. People didn’t become environmentalists. They just stopped leaving money on the ground.
An EU context that matters
Romania’s turnaround comes at a critical moment for EU packaging policy. Under the EU’s Single-Use Plastics Directive and the forthcoming Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, member states are expected to hit a 90% collection rate for plastic bottles and metal cans. Romania is closer to that target than other member states.
The shift marks a notable change for a country that has often struggled to meet EU recycling targets. Officials say the deposit system shows that large-scale environmental policies can be implemented relatively quickly. The Romanian model is drawing attention beyond its borders precisely because it has outperformed its peers. Deposit return schemes have historically taken root in wealthier, better-administered member states — Scandinavia, Germany, and the Netherlands. That one of the EU’s newer and poorer members has leapfrogged much of Western Europe on recycling of packaging waste is a data point Brussels is unlikely to ignore as it pushes reluctant capitals to meet the 2029 targets. “The transition of Europe toward a circular economy needs not only plans but also systems, investments, and cooperation. Romania is determined to turn environmental objectives into concrete results,” said Diana Buzoianu, the country’s environment minister, speaking at the Bucharest Resource Recovery summit.
The challenges ahead
Broader recycling issues remain unresolved, as beverage packaging accounts for 5% of total waste in Romania.
Collecting the bottles is step one. Turning it back into something useful is step two. Romania has gotten very good at step one. Step two is still a challenge — and according to the EU Parliament most member countries are in the same situation, as they don’t have enough industrial facilities to handle all of that volume domestically. For the wider EU that challenge translates into the need to develop the capacity to deal with all the collected beverage packaging. Otherwise, that packaging either sits in warehouses, gets shipped abroad for processing, or ends up being down-cycled — turned into lower-quality material rather than new bottles.
For now, the deposit system has changed how many Romanians interact with everyday waste. Whether that shift can be extended more broadly remains an open question.
