Not-for-profit company DDRS Alliance – whose members include Circularity Solutions, Domino Printing, Kezzler, Recycl3r, Tetra Pak, and Valpak – provides further insight to the report just published on the world’s first full-town Digital DRS trial in Brecon, Wales.

DDRS Alliance led the Welsh Government sponsored trial which ran for 16 weeks from July to November 2023, The long-awaited report on the trial has now been published by WRAP and is available to download. The report describes in detail the purpose of the trial, how it worked and the key results from it. It concludes that the trial demonstrated high levels of compliance with 18,794 rewards being claimed, more than four for every household. The trial area included all 4,300 households in the town of Brecon, which has a population of around 8,300 residents.

Those involved with the trial say the high level of cooperation with the scheme shows that people in Wales are open to using a digital deposit return scheme. For the first time, the public demonstrated a clear preference for having a choice of home-, community- and retail-based return options.

More positive results from the trial included:

• 58% of all returns came through the household collection route
• the trial showed a range of return options was preferred over any particular option
• 97.6% of all containers returned at home were captured in the recycling stream
• there was no significant fraud or misuse of the system
• 56% of those surveyed said they would recommend the scheme in the future

DDRS Alliance has added further insight and interpretation to the report:

• the trial demonstrated how highly valuable data is generated in a Digital DRS where every single drink container is tracked – providing insight into the way the public recycle at home, the way they interact with the products and packaging and their concerns and preferences about how they choose to recycle
• the technology generated data around which products were returned from which retailer, to which type of return point and whether singly or in bulk
• as only residents of the town itself had access to the kerbside return option, the adjusted kerbside return rate, had all participants been able to return at home, has been calculated at 64.6%
• the trial excluded multipacks and multi-serve chilled products (such as fresh juice and dairy), which are predominantly consumed at the home, and alcoholic drinks. These products would normally be part of a national DRS. Had these been part of the trial, it would be expected that kerbside returns would have been 70-80%
• a survey of participating retailers showed overwhelming support for the trial and for the continued development of Digital DRS in line with DDRS Alliance’s mission to develop a global blueprint based on defined standards

Over 70 stakeholders collaborated on the trial with funding from ACE UK, Aldi, Biffa, Coop, Danone, Morrisons, Nestlé Waters UK, Tetra Pak and Welsh Government.

DDRS Alliance is now finalising plans to trial the Digital DRS solution in a challenging urban environment where compliance and misuse is likely to be severely tested. The so-called ‘urban trial’ will be carried out in a North London borough later this year and will also model a segregated kerbside process – where DRS material is kept separated from general recycling material. The trial will also include containers serialised (or uniquely coded) in manufacture for the first time in an open retail environment.

Duncan Midwood, Co-founder of DDRS Alliance, said: “The true test of a Digital DRS solution is not whether the technology works – it clearly does and has demonstrated this for years – but whether the UK citizen will embrace what Digital DRS can bring – convenience and choice around recycling – and how they interact with it. The Brecon trial conclusively proved that the Welsh consumer finds Digital DRS a convenient and simple solution that fits with their current lifestyles and that kerbside recycling should feature in any future deposit return scheme. We are now set to demonstrate that these principles apply equally in a tough urban environment. The planned urban trial will look at how urban householders would engage with a Digital DRS and the impact of keeping DRS materials segregated at kerbside.”