Here where you see me, with my 52 years behind me, I am one of those who can tell—young people, don’t be scared—that I lived in a time when we children returned “the helmets.” My parents bought glass bottles (beer, wine, soda) for which they paid a “deposit” for those containers. When they consumed them, our parents sent us children to return them. You would go down to the neighborhood “bodega” – that’s what they called it in my house – and that man, I still remember his face, would take the bottles, place them in plastic boxes (clinc, clink) and give you a few pesetas for them that you would then give to your parents.
They paid you to recycle. And that idea is coming back strongly now.
Recycling what is a gerund. The problem of packaging recycling is not technological. The solutions have been around for decades. The problem is human behavior. Getting millions of people to change a shopping routine as ingrained as ours requires more than just an advertisement on TV that encourages us to recycle because it’s good for the environment. BonÀrea has been testing a solution to the problem for two years in Tarragona and Guissonaand data from their pilot project suggests that they may have found the key to solving the problem.
The 50 cent margin trick. He ReturnA system It works in a really simple way: the customer pays 0.45 euros as a deposit when purchasing a meat tray, and receives 0.50 euros when returning it. Five cents difference in favor of the consumer. It’s a small detail, but not accidental, because you don’t get back exactly what you put in, but rather you get a reward for returning that container. There is a big psychological difference between “getting yours back” and “making money by returning it”, and the data confirms this: the return rate is 60% and more than 72,000 single-use trays have been returned in this pilot phase.
Reusable trays. The objective is to completely change the economic equation. A single-use container has a production, transportation and waste management cost that must be amortized in a single use. A tray like those from BonÀrea and its RetornA program, which aims to be reused 50 times, distributes that cost over fifty cycles, which in theory (in theory, hopefully in practice) allows the final price of the product to be adjusted. It is the difference between the traditional “make, use, throw away” model and a more “circular” one in which the packaging has a residual value.
A great idea, but not for everyone.. The problem with packaging return and recycling systems like this is logistical. Someone has to collect the containers, clean them with sanitary guarantees and then reintroduce them into the company’s operating cycle. BonÀrea can do it because it controls the entire chain, from production to sale, without intermediaries. You can apply traceability to each tray, guarantee its cleanliness and manage that recycling without depending on third parties. In a conventional distribution chain in which external suppliers intervene, things become significantly complicated if one wants to achieve the same efficiency.
The debate over SDDR systems. In Spain we take time living with a problem in the Deposit, Return and Return Systems (SDDRwhich would be something like “incentivized recycling”) for beverage containers, for example. In countries like Germany or Nordic countries They have been applying these systems for decades with return rates greater than 90%. The beverage industry has been resisting the implementation of something like this for years because they would be the ones who would have to finance the system and bottlers have been investing in these “one-way” distribution chains for decades. The solution adopted in Spain has been to opt for recycling in containers as an alternative, but the results in terms of a real circular economy are significantly worse. The BonÀrea experiment shows that when there is a clear economic incentive and a controlled logistics chain, things work.
RetornA is going to expand. The pilot project has gone so well that starting in the second quarter of 2026, RetornA will be extended to all 460 BonÀrea stores in Catalonia. The total investment will exceed 10 million euros, and has the support of the Waste Agency of Catalonia. The company is in fact expanding the products that use the system, starting with chicken fillet and gradually adding other references. The next step will be to extend it to the rest of its stores throughout Spain, where it has more than 600 establishments.
But. There is a question that remains unanswered. What BonÀrea has demonstrated with its pilot is that the system works when the consumer has a direct economic incentive, the logistics platform is integrated and controlled by the company and that operating cycle is relatively short. What’s not clear is whether that 60% rate will be maintained when the system scales to 460 stores and millions of transactions, or whether it will eventually erode with day-to-day friction. We will see if those five cents manage to win the battle that recycling has been losing for decades.
Image | Joana Costa | BonÀrea
In Xataka | We have been recycling the garbage we produce for decades. Experts say it has been of no use.
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