Mircea Fechet: "SGR will collect 200 million packages in May"

The Guarantee-Return System will record a premiere at the end of this month when it will exceed the milestone of 200 million packages collected in 30 days, said Mircea Fechet, the Minister of Environment, Water and Forests, yesterday, at the inauguration of the counting and sorting center in Otopeni .

Mircea Fechet stated: "The figures show that 160 million packages were collected in April, i.e. 160 million PETs. On May 7, almost ten million packages were collected. On this occasion, I allow myself to make a prediction. I am convinced that in May we will break the barrier of 200 million packages collected in a month, just as I expect the system to grow every day. Of course, we must also talk about the economic opportunities that the Guarantee-Return System brings. The 150 jobs here in Otopeni, to which are probably added hundreds more jobs in a horizontal industry, which starts from the collection and ends with the recycling of these packaging, we are discussing investments, business opportunities, work which can only complete this environmental effort that we make every day".

For her part, Gemma Webb, CEO of RetuRO, the company in charge of managing SGR, showed that Romanian consumers have returned more than 350 million packages to date.

Gemma Webb said: "Romanians have responded wonderfully to this system, and the quantities of returned packaging are increasing more and more at an exponential rate. So far, Romanian consumers have returned over 350 million packages, a fantastic thing. In the last ten days, only from the mountains and the sea we have collected 10 million packages. (...) we anticipated that summer is coming and prepared for an exponential increase in return rates in the system and improved logistics efficiency. Part of these measures is the increase in the number of trucks for transport. We have 500 trucks collecting three times more than we had at the beginning of April."

The SGR representative also specified how the activity will be carried out at the center in Otopeni: "Here we will employ over 150 people, so we are talking about 150 green jobs, which means that we will have over 500 people employed throughout the country in the four centers open so far. At the Otopeni Center we will process glass, plastic and aluminum. There are packages of these materials that we will count, sort them according to material, color, compact them, and then sell the materials to recyclers who will bring them back into the system. So, it is the foundation of the circular economy in Romania and it is a very big step forward for us. In Bucharest, 1.8 billion packages can be sorted, and at the national level we have the capacity to count and sort almost three billion packages, annually. We see that the system is gradually starting to collect more and more packaging and today the four regional centers in Cluj, Braşov, Timişoara and Otopeni are developing. We have an infrastructure that we continue to develop and we will open more centers in Bacău, Dolj and Prahova, in the next two months".

The SGR packaging counting and sorting center, opened yesterday in Otopeni, joins the three already opened, so far, in the counties of Cluj, Timiş and Braşov.