Bulgaria has sent Brussels a draft law to set up a national deposit scheme for drink containers, asking the European Commission to check it early. The bill would change the Waste Management Act. It has not yet gone to parliament. The environment ministry says the scheme will be worked out in the open.

The draft was filed through the Commission's TRIS system, a standard step the EU requires for new national technical rules.

The draft still has to be made public, and only then will public debate start. The ministry plans to talk to drink makers, retailers, trade groups, recycling firms, local councils, civic groups and others involved in the scheme. It wants to hear all views and proposals before finishing the bill.

When drafting the text, the ministry looked at EU packaging waste rules, including Regulation (EU) 2025/40, as well as how other EU countries run their schemes and Bulgaria's own needs.

The state will not run the scheme itself but will stand behind it, said environment minister Rositsa Karamfilova. She called the deposit scheme a major change that must be built through an open, professional process.

"The deposit scheme has to work the same way for everyone, whether you live in a big city or in the most remote village," Karamfilova said.

The firm that runs the scheme will constantly hold hundreds of millions of euros that are not its own, the minister explained, including unclaimed deposits and the value of materials from millions of containers each year. "We want to build a system that works well and is fair too. The deposit is the public's money," she added.

The environment ministry says the scheme is meant to boost separate collection and recycling of certain drink containers and get more use out of the materials in them. Moving to a circular economy and using resources better are among the ministry's top goals, and the deposit scheme is a step toward handling packaging waste more effectively, the ministry's press office says.

In April this year the environment ministry put its proposed changes to the Waste Management Act up for public debate. In early January, a separate bill for a state deposit scheme for packaging went to parliament. Non-government groups and business organisations objected to that version.

Setting up the deposit scheme is part of Bulgaria's plan to join the OECD and is linked to a review by the organisation's environmental policy committee. It is the last step needed to close that review of Bulgaria's environment sector.