Deposit return scheme: impact on small grocers

Section 1: Introduction

1.1 Background

In the 2017 Programme for Government, the Scottish Government committed to introducing a deposit return scheme (DRS) on drinks containers for Scotland.

The Scottish Grocers' Federation (SGF) has highlighted two routes by which the introduction of such a scheme could impact financially on small grocers. They are:

• Cost per square metre (Cost M²)
• The cost of staff time spent maintaining machines or processing returns (Staff cost per hour)

SGF members operate a diverse variety of premises, general small and medium convenience stores, and the impacts on their businesses are likely to be different depending on whether returns are carried out on a manual or mechanised basis and on what products are in scope.

Given these uncertainties, this research has delivered a set of scalable costs which can be fed into any system design in order to allow an evidence-based discussion regardless of what system design is selected.

This Results Report includes a table of the values which have been derived in this study and the methodology that was taken in generating them.