What Beverage Containers Can Teach Australia’s Next Phase of Packaging Reform

Thursday 10 September 2026

Shannon Doherty-Andall, Sustainability Manager, Australian Beverages Council

The current discussion around circular economy policy in Australia tends to take a broad and abstract form: fee structures, material flows, and design standards – to name a few.  

In beverage packaging, we see those issues already made tangible. 

Beverage containers are embedded in everyday life and already subject to one of Australia’s most established product stewardship models: container deposit schemes. That makes non-alcoholic beverage packaging Australia’s most useful and fulsome test case for circular economy policy. As Australia’s most successful EPR scheme, CDS may not provide every answer, but it does show what happens when packaging design, consumer participation, collection infrastructure, material recovery, industry funding and regulation are brought together in a practical way. 

One of the strengths of CDS is that they give consumers a clear incentive to return eligible containers. It may seem simple, but it matters.  

Circular systems rely not only on regulation or industry action, but on millions of individual decisions made every day by every one of us. CDS has turned a beverage container from something that was often overlooked in consumer disposal behaviour, into something that had a recognised value and therefore, a clear motivation to return correctly. Can you assign a returnable monetary value to every piece of packaging that comes into your home? No. But you can use a deposit incentive to encourage quick behaviour change in high-risk items such as batteries and vapes, or create an eco-modulated fee structure to encourage more circular design choices.  

CDS creates a source separated, food-grade collection pathway for highly recyclable materials such as PET, aluminium and glass.  

Compared with mixed waste or commingled kerbside recycling, single-stream collections are proven to support cleaner material recovery and higher-value recycling outcomes. This is essential for a successful circular economy: to not only collect material, but to steward it in a way that preserves its highest value for reuse. Regulatory settings must place obligations on all parts of the materials recovery chain to deliver the best quality outputs it can. While difficult, closing the quality gap between CDS and kerbside can be achieved through strong regulatory requirements in the collection, sortation and processing stages.   

The non-alcoholic beverages industry continues to improve the recyclability of packaging itself. Over recent years and at the urging of CDS scheme coordinators, businesses across the sector have worked to phase out materials and components that can create challenges in recycling systems, including PVC in labels and containers, and other materials such as PETG, PLA and irregular packaging components. These changes are not always visible to consumers, but they are important. A label, sleeve, adhesive or closure can affect whether a container moves cleanly through the recycling system or creates contamination and processing challenges. For other sectors, the takeaway is clear: design standards are not just a compliance exercise. Done well, they help preserve material value and increase the volume of packaging that can be brought back into productive use. 

CDS demonstrates why nationally-led reform matters.  

Across Australia, CDS has grown through different state and territory frameworks, and while they have delivered strong outcomes, the variation in rules, scope and timing can make implementation harder than it needs to be. As more packaging categories are brought into the EPR ecosystem, one of the clearest lessons is that a federal approach can give businesses the consistency to invest, consumers a clearer system to participate in, and the certainty required for recovered materials to move through the system efficiently. 

These are some of the reasons CDS are such a useful policy example. It shows that circularity is not achieved through one intervention alone. It requires better design before a product is placed on the market, incentives that support consumer behaviour, processing systems that can manage recovered material at scale, and material quality high enough to support genuine end markets. 

That does not mean every packaging category can or should be treated exactly like beverage containers. They all have different uses, recovery pathways and market realities. But a future nationally-led policy should learn from what CDS have demonstrated: clear obligations, measurable outcomes and shared responsibility can work.

For further information, contact Shannon.