The yellow bag lost its cans. The collection round still calls at the same block
Author:
Paweł Matusiak
·
On 31 August 2026 Wirtualna Polska reported deposit-scheme operators’ 2025 losses of more than PLN 50 million. By the end of July 3.2 billion containers had been returned. RIPOK estimates municipal plants lost about half of their income from selling materials, while yellow-bag tonnage fell only 3–4 per cent. The collection firm still has to enter the estate.
On 31 August 2026 Wirtualna Polska reported the 2025 financial statements of Poland’s deposit-return operators. All of them closed in the red. Combined losses exceed PLN 50 million. Kaucja.pl alone reported PLN 27 million.
Kaucja.pl’s spokeswoman told WP that 3.2 billion containers had been collected by the end of July, up from 2.3 billion at the end of June. For 2026 operators must show a 77 per cent return rate against containers placed on the market. The reckoning date is 31 December 2026.
For the operator of a reverse-vending machine that is a balance of start-up cost and collection rate. For the firm that sends refuse lorries onto estates each morning the effect is different. PET bottles and metal cans have left the yellow bag. The round under the block of flats has not.
RIPOK’s estimates for the first half of 2026
On 12 August 2026 Rzeczpospolita published first-half 2026 estimates from the Council of Regional Municipal Waste Treatment Plants. RIPOK’s president, Piotr Szewczyk, said municipal plants had lost about 50 per cent of their income from selling recovered materials. The cost of treating waste in those plants had risen by roughly 15 per cent.
Szewczyk rejects the claim that the deposit scheme has relieved the municipal system because less waste is collected. Yellow bags lost only 3–4 per cent of their mass. What left them were the two most valuable materials: PET and cans. He put a tonne of cans at PLN 9,000.
In the same article Marek Wójcik of the Association of Polish Cities described a round that cannot be cancelled. A smaller municipality used to send one lorry a month for plastics and bring back a full load. Today it brings back a third, and the vehicle still has to go out. Nobody will tell residents that plastics will be collected once a quarter because the bottles went into a machine.
Maciej Kiełbus, a lawyer who advises local governments, gave Rzeczpospolita the scale of the subsidy. In 2025 municipalities put about PLN 1.5 billion into the system on costs estimated at more than PLN 15 billion. Some raised charges and still had to top the system up.
There is no extended-producer-responsibility statute in force. EPR is, according to the paper’s sources, meant to fund municipal systems with a charge on companies that place packaging on the market. The bill has not been passed. The climate ministry told the paper it could not give a date for the government to adopt the draft.
An example: a dozen lorries and three municipalities
Imagine a company that collects municipal waste from several gminas around a medium-sized town. It has a dozen vehicles, a dispatcher, two-person crews and a sorting plant that weighs what comes back from the round. This is not a GESOFT client. It is a typical situation in which the jam does not start with a statute but with the street list for the day.
The municipal contracts say how often mixed waste, bio-waste, the yellow bag, glass and paper are collected. The timetable sits in a council resolution and on the town-hall website. In practice the dispatcher builds the day in a spreadsheet: vehicle, driver, loader, street order. Changes go by messenger when someone is off sick or a lorry is in the workshop.
After the deposit scheme started, the yellow bag on the stairwell is lighter by whatever people returned in the shop. Tonnage on the weighbridge falls by a few per cent. The value of the load falls more sharply, because the cans have gone. The municipality still wants collection on the same rhythm. The resident who put the bag out does not care whether there is PET inside.
The jam in this firm looks like this: in the morning the lorry leaves with a list from a spreadsheet; in the afternoon the plant has a different weight than last year; in the evening the municipality rings to say a bin was left on one property. The dispatcher reconciles that from memory and from chat messages. A shared stop list with a status — collected, not put out, complaint — would spare that reconciliation.
A round that does not shrink
A collection is not planned from the tonne, it is planned from the property. The lorry works a street because the resolution names a day and a fraction, not because the bag happens to contain a kilogram of aluminium. When the aluminium went into a machine, the kilometre remained.
In the example company with a dozen vehicles this shows on a Thursday, when the yellow bag is due. The crew works the same yards as a year ago. Time spent at a block of flats barely changes: the bin store has to be opened, the bags pulled, the place left tidy. A lower material value does not shorten that job.
Fuel, servicing and two wages per vehicle are counted from hours and kilometres. If the dispatcher cannot see which lorry has finished its patch and which is still on a second loop, overtime appears after the event. The morning spreadsheet does not say whether the round closed.
What helps is a round board for the day, shared by the office and the crew. The driver ticks the stop, notes “not put out”, or photographs the bin store. The dispatcher does not ring round in sequence to reconstruct the afternoon. That run card does not replace a tachograph or a waste-collection permit. It organises what the lorry will not skip anyway.
An off-the-shelf fleet programme will show fuel and the service due. It will not show that on Thursday patch B is yellow-bag and patch C is bio-waste, and that those two diaries cannot share one vehicle. What matters here is a fraction calendar pinned to a street. Hauliers gather vehicle, job and document on one run card. The consignment note is replaced by the municipal timetable.
The weighbridge and the gap left by aluminium
The sorting plant earns from what can be sold. The lorry comes onto the weighbridge, tips a fraction, and leaves. The mass difference goes into the register. The line then separates PET, aluminium, film and contamination. The invoice to the buyer is from the tonne and from quality.
When cans worth PLN 9,000 a tonne went into the deposit scheme, the sorting line kept running. Income from that part of the stream fell. What remains is the rest of the plastic, multi-material packaging and whatever the resident should not have put in the yellow bag. The cost of running the plant, according to RIPOK, rose at the same time.
At the same company the jam is at the join between the weighbridge and the office. The driver has a ticket in the cab or on a phone. Accounts have a different table of material sales. When the municipality asks for tonnages in a given month, someone stitches the two sets by hand. A miss of a few tonnes appears at contract settlement, not at the hopper.
A fraction register with date, vehicle, inbound and outbound mass, linked to the buyer’s invoice, closes that gap. It does not have to be a full warehouse ERP. It is enough that the weighbridge does not live in a notebook and that aluminium sales do not live in a different file from Thursday’s tip.
The climate ministry praises the scale of returns: 1.6 billion containers by the end of May 2026, 62,000 return points, 13,000 of them with machines. WP later added 3.2 billion by the end of July. The more that goes through the shop, the less valuable aluminium hits the municipal weighbridge. The plant will not “fix” that with a faster belt.
The crew still climbs in when the bag is lighter
On 25 August 2026 Statistics Poland published July wages. In water supply, sewerage, waste management and remediation the average gross wage was PLN 8,721.40, 7.3 per cent up on a year earlier. Across the enterprise sector it was PLN 9,509.02, up 6.8 per cent. Source: Poland’s socio-economic situation.
The section average is not the loader’s rate on a given lorry. It does show that crews did not get cheaper in the year the aluminium left the bag. The firm pays people by the hour and by the shift, not by the value of cans on the scale.
In that firm’s depot a two-person crew on one vehicle is the smallest set that leaves the yard at all. A driver off sick in the morning means reshuffling three patches, because the loader without a licence will not go out alone. If the hours record sits in a different file from the round, the office learns of the gap when the lorry does not leave the depot.
Hours tied to the vehicle and the patch show who drove, how long the loop took and whether a second shift came on overtime. It is the same kind of work a cleaning firm does with hours on a site: what counts is the place and the time, not the national average. Here the place is a street from the timetable.
A phone app for the crew is useful when the driver does not come back with a slip of paper. Stop status and the start of the loop are entered at the bin store, not at a desk after the vehicle is washed. If the crew will not tap it, the office is back to messenger.
A complaint, a new contractor and textiles twice a year
From 1 September 2026 Józefów in Otwock County charges PLN 45 per resident for waste collected separately and PLN 100 where segregation is not met. Gazeta Prawna described the 17 July resolution. PreZero takes over collection. The timetable changes. Bulky waste and waste electrical equipment are due twice a year. A new service is textiles collected from the property, also twice a year.
Józefów based the calculation on 20,600 residents and 2025 tonnages. In the first half of 2026 it collected 1,489 tonnes of green waste and 1,697 tonnes of mixed waste. The gap is 208 tonnes. Bio-waste runs almost like mixed waste. In summer the bio-waste lorry is not an add-on to the diary. It is a second diary.
For the dispatcher in the example a complaint does not wait for a new resolution. The resident rings the municipality, the municipality rings the office, the office rings the driver who is on a second loop. The question is whether the lorry was at that address. Without a photograph of the bin store and without a stop status it is one word against another. A second visit eats an hour from a crew that was meant to move on.
A ticket with address, fraction, date and a photo, tied to the run card, ends that chain of calls. The municipality can see the status without waiting for a manual report. The resident — through the office or a short form — sees that the matter entered a queue rather than vanishing in an inbox. It is the same logic a field-service firm uses for a visit report: place, time, photo, job closed.
A separate calendar for bulky waste, electrical waste and textiles cannot hang on a slip by the board in the depot. Those collections are rare, so they are easy to miss, and the resident puts a washing machine out on that very day. If the date from the resolution does not sit in the same diary as an ordinary Thursday, the crew will take the mixed waste and drive past the machine.
KPO and BDO beside the street list
The BDO register and waste-transfer notes remain. An official register is not replaced by a company panel. Trouble starts when the weighbridge mass, the transfer note and the report for the municipality are born in three places and meet only at an inspection or at a contract addendum.
There the driver has a photo of the weighbridge ticket on a phone, and someone else raises the BDO document in the afternoon. If the tonnes do not match, the correction goes the next day, and the lorry is already on another fraction. A local mass register, tied to the run, gives BDO the same figures that hit the scale. A fuller account of what an inspector will not forgive on a transfer note is in the piece on a company waste register.
The municipality counts recycling rates. A climate-ministry notice explains that a municipal collector’s report must not include the mass of deposit packaging gathered in shops and other return points. Those tonnes come from the representative organisation’s return, due by 31 January. The collection firm reports its own stream from properties. If the weighbridge and the transfer note diverge, the authority is left with two sets of figures: machines in the shop and bags from the estate.
A spreadsheet, a ready-made product, an integration, a panel of one’s own
Two lorries, one municipality, a dispatcher who knows every bin store: a spreadsheet and a chat group will do. The cost of writing anything will exceed the time lost on the phone. There is no reason to touch a working diary if a clash is visible from the depot window.
A ready-made fleet or field-service product can be reasonable when the firm wants GPS, a job list and photos, and the municipal timetable can be mapped onto it. The test is whether fractions, days and exceptions (a public holiday, bulky waste, textiles) fit the product calendar rather than notes in the margin.
An integration makes sense when the weighbridge has an interface, accounts have an import format, and BDO stays where the statute puts it. Then a third store is not built. Mass from the run is joined to the invoice and to a local copy of what went to the authority.
A panel of one’s own starts to pay when there are several gminas with different days, a plant that sells materials, complaints from the town hall and a crew that will not go back to paper. A ready-made product stops being enough when Thursday in gmina A is yellow-bag and in gmina B is bio-waste, and the weighbridge has to serve both settlements. Then one does not buy “a waste system”. One lays out the day as the lorries actually run.
Rounds, the scale and tickets in one panel
GESOFT designs panels and field apps around a given firm’s flow, not around a generic municipality. In a collection company that usually comes down to a few places that show up in the same week after the deposit scheme: the round board, a run card with stop status, a mass register from the scale, a complaint ticket with an address, and a local record for the transfer note.
Not every one of those pieces needs its own programme. Sometimes it is enough to add statuses to a fleet product that already exists, or to line the weighbridge up with the buyer’s invoice. The conversation starts from where a round or a tonne is lost today, not from a list of modules.
3.2 billion containers in machines is the scale from the remarks to WP. A smaller municipal firm feels the same mechanism with one patch and one vehicle on the yellow bag. The difference is the number of lorries. The yellow bag still has to be collected, even when the cans went back to the shop.
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