Six days after SDR Portugal celebrated 305 million returned containers, Portugal’s deposit-return scheme has become the subject of its first open political fight. On Tuesday 15 September, Carlos Moedas, the PSD mayor of Lisbon, used the presentation of his executive’s June–August report to the Lisbon Municipal Assembly to ask the Montenegro government to “cancel this system immediately”, exactly as France did earlier this month. Volta, he said, has been “a tax for those who pay and an unprecedented social drama in the city”. On Wednesday the environment and energy minister, Maria da Graça Carvalho, speaking in Strasbourg, ruled it out in one sentence: “No, it is not in prospect. It is mandatory at European level.”
For Nordic readers the exchange matters because the machinery at the centre of it is Norwegian. TOMRA Collection, the reverse-vending division of Asker-listed Tomra Systems, is the named technology supplier behind the more than 3,000 automatic Pontos Volta installed in Portuguese supermarkets since the scheme went live on 10 April, and Envipco, its Amsterdam- and Oslo-listed rival, is the exclusive supplier of the bulk-feed kiosks. Portugal was meant to be TOMRA’s “lighthouse” for Southern Europe. The lighthouse is now being contested by the mayor of the capital, a 37,000-signature petition and a run of television reports about people rummaging through bins for ten-cent refunds.
What Moedas said, and who applauded
“This summer also brought a new challenge: the Volta system,” Moedas told the assembly, according to the Lusa account carried by ECO and Ambiente Online. “A recycling and reuse policy is necessary, and a city like ours has to be concerned with recycling more and more, but an environmental policy should be neither a tax nor a social drama.” Then the request: “Once again, I ask the government to do exactly what was done in France: cancel this system immediately. It is a good intention. It is a bad result. We do not want it.” The mayor’s complaint is operational as much as social. Since the launch, Lisbon and other municipalities have reported communal bins being rummaged through or tipped onto the street by people looking for containers carrying the Volta symbol, and the mayor has said he has footage of people climbing into rubbish containers. The scheme refunds €0.10 for every single-use plastic, metal or aluminium drink container under three litres returned to a collection point.
The applause came from an unusual quarter. Sofia Lisboa, the Communist Party’s deputy in the assembly, welcomed the mayor’s position while attacking “the government’s subordination to private interests” and asking “who pays for this system?”; she also said recent data put Lisbon top of the country for complaints about urban waste. The city’s urban-hygiene councillor, Joana Baptista, replied that waste complaints had fallen this year, not risen. The French precedent that Moedas invoked is real: on 4 September the French ecology minister, Mathieu Lefèvre, abandoned plans for a mandatory national deposit scheme after resistance from local authorities, and TOMRA and Envipco shares fell sharply in Oslo on the following Monday.
The minister’s answer: 304 million containers, 44 percent, and €600 million in fines
Graça Carvalho’s response, reported by ECO, Jornal de Negócios, Expresso and Renascença on 16 September, rested on four points. First, obligation: the deposit system is a European requirement and a reform written into Portugal’s Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR), so abandoning it inside the programme’s window “would mean a very large loss”. Second, money already lost: Portugal, she said, has paid €600 million in fines to the European Commission over the last two years for missing plastic-recycling targets. Third, results: 304 million containers have been returned since 10 April, and the return rate for plastic bottles has reached 44 percent, already above the 40 percent target set for the end of this year. Fourth, diagnosis: the problems are concentrated in cities with “more social problems”, more homelessness and weaker street cleaning, and are “more structural than this Volta system”. “The social drama is independent of Volta,” she said. “It is a social drama related to poverty.”
The government is nonetheless “studying solutions”. The one the minister described is a dedicated receptacle for Volta-eligible containers attached to ordinary street bins, so that collectors do not need to open the bins themselves; on 1 September, in Brussels, she had already spoken of reinforcing inspection and involving municipalities in siting machines. Portugal, she noted, was among the last EU countries to adopt a deposit system and can borrow fixes from the others, all of which saw disruption in their first months. The minister’s count is consistent with what SDR Portugal itself published five days earlier: 305 million containers at a run rate of about 5 million a day, having tripled since the end of July.
| Position | Who | What they want |
|---|---|---|
| Cancel now | Carlos Moedas, Mayor of Lisbon (PSD); PCP group in the Lisbon assembly | Immediate cancellation, following France; Lisbon says the scheme is “a tax for those who pay” and a source of urban-hygiene problems |
| Suspend and audit | Citizens’ petition “For the End of the Volta System” (first signatory João Pontes), 34,211 signatures on filing 15 August, more than 37,000 by 15 September | Immediate suspension and an independent audit of SDR Portugal’s financial, operational and environmental model; alleges costs are shifted from companies to consumers and that it is unclear who profits |
| Keep and fix | Maria da Graça Carvalho, Minister for Environment and Energy; the environmental group ZERO has also publicly defended the scheme’s effectiveness | Scheme stays: EU-mandatory, PRR reform, 44 percent return rate; add Volta receptacles to street bins, reinforce inspection, involve municipalities |
| Operate | SDR Portugal (association of more than 20 beverage producers and retailers, president Leonardo Mathias); TOMRA Collection Portugal (MD Paulo Borges); Envipco | Scale the network: 3,000-plus automatic machines, 12 kiosks contracted, target of 50, direct collection for hospitality |
Sources: ECO (15 and 16 September), Jornal de Negócios, Ambiente Online/Lusa, SDR Portugal statement of 10 September, Assembleia da República petition record. NorthSouth HQ compilation.
The petition in parliament
The formal channel for the opposition is a citizens’ petition, “For the End of the Volta System and the Creation of a Fair Packaging-Management Model”, which was filed with the Assembleia da República on 15 August with 34,211 signatures and referred four days later to the Environment and Energy Committee, where it awaits a decision on admissibility. By 15 September it had passed 37,000 signatures on the Petição Pública platform, five times the 7,500 needed for a plenary debate. Its authors describe it as “from citizens to citizens” and unaffiliated to any party. Beyond suspension, the substantive demand is an independent audit of SDR Portugal, the not-for-profit association of beverage producers, packers, distributors and retailers that operates the scheme, and whose members, the petition argues, pass the system’s cost to consumers without disclosing who profits. That is a question a parliamentary committee can put to SDR Portugal and, by extension, to its suppliers.
What it means for TOMRA and the Nordic model
The realistic near-term outcome is the one the minister described: the scheme continues, with retrofits. That is the pattern in every European deposit market, including TOMRA’s home one, where Norway’s Infinitum system took years to reach the 90-percent-plus return rates that Portugal is now being asked to emulate. A 44 percent plastic-bottle return rate five months in already exceeds the scheme’s own year-end target, and the political noise is not about whether the machines work but about who bears the social cost of a €0.10 incentive in cities with visible poverty. The government’s proposed fix, a Volta receptacle on every bin, is a municipal procurement of street furniture, not a change to the reverse-vending contract.
The risk for the Nordic suppliers is reputational and second-order rather than contractual. France has just shown that deposit schemes can be stopped before they start; Portugal is now the test of whether one can be stopped after it starts, and Oslo is watching. E24’s technical-analysis column on 16 September was headlined as a sell call on “the deposit shares”, and Finansavisen reported Pareto Securities on 14 September assessing calls to delay the UK scheme as a limited risk for TOMRA and Envipco; every headline that puts “Portugal” and “cancel” in the same sentence adds to that file. For SDR Portugal’s suppliers the useful response is data: the return rate, the tonnes of PET and aluminium actually recycled, and the number of manual return points in small shops, which is where the scheme is thinnest. The 2027 budget and the PRR deadline both argue for continuity; the mayor of Lisbon, who faces the same electorate as the government, argues for the opposite. NorthSouth HQ will follow the committee’s decision on the petition and SDR Portugal’s six-month figures in October.
Nordic operators with Portuguese subsidiaries in waste, packaging and retail are listed in the Nordic Companies in Portugal directory; TOMRA’s Portuguese profile is here.