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SINGAPORE: As the Beverage Container Return Scheme (BCRS) enters full implementation on Thursday (Oct 1), retailers across Singapore raced against the clock to pull unmarked drinks from shelves and restock their inventory with compliant products.<\/p>\n
While major supermarket chains made it in time to replace the non-compliant stock on their shelves, some smaller heartland operators and provision stores have found themselves needing more time to refresh their inventories with\u00a0drinks that\u00a0bear the BCRS mark.<\/p>\n
This comes despite a six-month transition period and steep fire sales to clear older stock before Oct 1.<\/p>\n
To get more breathing room, more than 2,000 merchants – mostly provision shops, neighbourhood convenience stores and standalone food stores \u2014 applied for a one-month grace period which the National Environment Agency (NEA) announced less than two weeks before the deadline.<\/p>\n
NEA on Tuesday said it had approved around 85 per cent of the more than 1,600 applications processed so far and is \u201cexpediting\u201d the remaining ones.<\/p>\n
Under the nationwide scheme, suppliers and producers charge a 10-cent (US$0.78) deposit on eligible metal and plastic drink containers. Consumers pay the deposit at purchase and can reclaim it by returning empty containers to Return Right reverse vending machines.<\/p>\n
Eligible containers carry deposit marks to indicate that the additional deposit applies. During the transition period, both marked and unmarked containers have been available on shelves, causing some confusion among consumers.<\/p>\n
After the deadline has passed, regulated beverage products supplied in Singapore must carry the deposit mark, except for those sold by smaller retailers granted the one-month grace period.<\/p>\n
A couple of days before Oct 1, CNA visited 18 retail stores and coffee shops and saw a mixture of marked and unmarked beverage containers still on shelves.<\/p>\n
Scarlett, a chain specialising in Chinese products, still had a large proportion of unmarked drinks at an outlet CNA visited on Wednesday \u2013 a day before the deadline.<\/p>\n
A staff member, who was applying deposit mark stickers to containers, said she would spend the rest of her shift doing so, before staff on the night shift continued the work.<\/p>\n
The outlet will remove from its shelves any drinks for which BCRS stickers had yet to arrive by Wednesday night.<\/p>\n
The employee, who declined to be named, said she had been applying stickers to products since last month but still had a few hundred more to go.<\/p>\n
Most new stock would come with the deposit mark already applied by suppliers, she said. The outlet had also run “buy one free one” promotions in a bid to clear unmarked beverages.<\/p>\n
Several outlets of Don Don Donki also had unmarked drink bottles and cans on Tuesday, though they were labelled as non-BCRS items and came with discounts ranging from about 30 per cent to more than 60 per cent.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, staff at a Don Don Donki outlet in Northpoint City were spotted applying deposit mark stickers to beverages, as well as replacing product and price labels on the shelves to indicate that products were covered by the BCRS.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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SINGAPORE: As the Beverage Container Return Scheme (BCRS) enters full implementation on Thursday (Oct 1), retailers across Singapore raced against the clock to pull unmarked…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":89257,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/dam.mediacorp.sg\/image\/upload\/s--RnFGbWlZ--\/c_fill,g_auto,h_676,w_1200\/fl_relative,g_south_east,l_mediacorp:cna:watermark:2021-08:cna,w_0.1\/f_auto,q_auto\/v1\/mediacorp\/cna\/image\/2026\/09\/30\/img_20260930_172026.jpg?itok=QVAWYvXf","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[10775,15031,617,14560,7682,570,19985,712,2257,28113,2764,15033,30880],"class_list":["post-89256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buzz-news-sg-global","tag-beverage","tag-container","tag-ends","tag-label","tag-period","tag-race","tag-remove","tag-retailers","tag-return","tag-schemes","tag-stock","tag-transition","tag-unmarked","wpcat-2-id"],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89256\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/89257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}