Deposit-return in hospitality: 10 cents per can from November, and nobody has written yet who pays you back

SDDR, the deposit, return and refund system, is a refundable amount that travels with every drinks pack: charged when sold and refunded when the empty is returned. It is not a tax.

Article 47 of Royal Decree 1055/2022 requires SDDR to be rolled out nationwide within two years if Spain misses separate-collection targets for single-use plastic bottles.

Spain collected 41.3% of those bottles in 2023, against a 70% target. The MITECO report with that figure was published on 26 November 2024. That is where the two years come from.

On the amount, the royal decree says the deposit “shall be set freely by the producer extended-responsibility schemes in an amount equal to or greater than 10 euro cents”. Ten is the floor, not the price.

You pay the deposit first, when you buy stock from your supplier. The royal decree puts the first payment on the producer, and that amount travels down the chain to your invoice.

You pay the ten cents in October and recover them when the pack returns to the system. If it returns.

If the empty ends in the yellow bin, as today, those ten cents stop being parked cash and become cost.

Today, 17 September 2026, there is no published rule that forces you to do that. Nor one that frees you from it.

Article 47 only says that “traders or distributors of packaged drinks shall take part in the deposit, return and refund systems that are established”.

Take part. Not a word on what that means if what you run is a bar.

It is still undecided whether a bar is a return point for packs it did not sell, whether there will be a floor-space threshold for small venues, how you recover the deposit you advanced, and what compensation anyone who accepts returns is paid.

It is this week’s fight, and it has no winner.

On 17 September 2026, Hostelería de España asked for on-premise consumption to be exempt from SDDR. Their argument: “the pack is opened and consumed on the premises, remaining at all times under the hospitality operator’s control”.

Delivery and takeaway would fall under the general regime.

For returns it proposes using the network that already exists: the distributor who brings the order takes the empties away. And creating “social return points” in towns, volunteer-run and compensated.

It is a request. It is not the rule.

Own estimate for a venue selling 50 cans, plastic bottles and cartons a day and open 350 days a year. Not a market figure.

50 packs × €0.10 = €5 a day, €1,750 a year advanced in deposits.

If they all come back, your cost is zero and you have only had about €100 parked in the storeroom. Manageable.

If none come back, that is €1,750 of new cost.

Against the real margin associations talk about today, between 3% and 4%, a venue turning over €300,000 makes between €9,000 and €12,000 a year.

Those €1,750 are between 15% and 19% of the whole year’s profit. For paperwork, not for selling less.

At sector scale, €1,750 for each of the more than 300,000 venues in the Spanish Hospitality Yearbook is about €525 million a year circulating in deposits through hospitality. Own linear split: useful to size the issue, not to budget.

It is circulating a lot these days: a hospitality venue generates on average 23 glass packs a day, versus 0.5 for a household.

It is a real figure and it comes from Hostelería de España. But it is glass, and glass is not in mandatory SDDR.

Your beer and wine bottles carry no deposit. Your cans and water bottles do. If someone runs a sum mixing both, the sum is wrong.

1. Count how many SDDR packs you really move. Cans, plastic bottles and cartons, kept separate from glass. Without that number you cannot value anything. It takes the most time and is the only piece that does not depend on the rule.
2. Ask your distributor how they will invoice the deposit and whether they will collect empties. That answer decides whether this costs you zero or costs you €1,750.
3. Split delivery and takeaway from on-premise sales in your till system. In every proposal on the table, those channels take different paths.
4. Buy nothing. No machine, no service. There is no published technical specification.

The implementing rules are not published. MITECO opened a prior public consultation on the new packaging royal decree and announced a later consultation with the draft. That draft is what has to answer everything above.

The operator itself doubts the deadline. José María Bonmatí, president of SDDR para España, the body that applied to run the system, said in July 2025 that “having a pack-return system in Spain by November 2026 is impossible”. He talks about nearly 500,000 points of sale across retail and hospitality.

Press dates do not line up with each other. Several general media outlets have given 12 August 2026 as the start date and others put the obligation in 2029. The only date backed by an official document is 26 November 2026, and it is a legal ceiling, not the day something starts working behind your bar.

So before you get angry at the rule, count your cans. It is the only number in this whole story you can already have today.