I don’t want to hear that a restaurant suffers because the bottles are picked up late / The Guarantee-Return System cannot take a holiday

The Minister of the Environment, Waters and Forests, Mircea Fechet, said on Monday, in relation to the Guarantee-Return System, that HoReCa “must have top priority” and claims that SGR “cannot take a vacation”.

“Of course it is possible (for HoReCa entrepreneurs to buy their own packaging collection machines – no). Just as there is the possibility of associations between collection points and local public authorities, more precisely town halls and collection point representatives. I’m glad you asked me about HoReCa because, as I also communicated to the representatives of the RetuRO company, especially since the hot season is coming, HoReCa must have top priority. I don’t want to hear about a restaurant or any other type of business suffering because bottles, PETs or aluminum cans are being picked up late“, declared Mircea Fechet, on Monday.

The minister also said that there are discussions for the installation of automatic collection points, RVM, in areas with a lot of tourists.

“Whether we’re talking about beaches, whether we’re talking about mountain resorts, we’re trying to be prepared, to be one step ahead, which hasn’t happened before, I have to admit and make the system more accessible.”

The Minister of Environment, Water and Forests also stated that the SGR is a system that cannot take a vacation.

“I would like to take this opportunity to tell you one more thing that I have already communicated to the representatives of the RetuRO company, namely that The Guarantee-Return System is a system that cannot take a vacation, neither during the Easter mini-vacation, nor during the May 1st mini-vacation, nor on other occasions. The Guarantee-Return system is almost a public utility system. Just as those who pick up the garbage or those who deal with the provision of drinking water have neither Easter, nor New Year’s Eve, nor May 1st, I expect the same from the RetuRO company, I also expect from the companies that provide the transport infrastructure for millions of packages. We exceeded the figure of 5 million packages per day“, he concluded.

We remind you that the Romanian restaurant owners, members of the HORA organization, ask the Ministry of the Environment to postpone the obligations to collect packaging through the Guarantee-Return System (SGR), “until it is proven that it works and that no major costs are needed ” from them.

They complained that restaurants face problems in storing the packaging bags and that they have to be careful when handling the respective bottles in vain, as they deteriorate when RetuRO picks them up.

“In the bags we have bottles of different drinks, wine, juices, water. Some of them are completely emptied, some are not. If RetuRO doesn’t come the next day to take everything you’ve recycled, then they start to leak out of those bags, into a room that must somehow be specially allocated for this storage”, said Daniel Mischie, member of the HORA Board of Directors and CEO of the CityGrill restaurant group, as we showed on StartupCafe.ro.