'Got bottled cola?' Glass containers vanish as single-use packaging takes over

Reusable glass containers are rapidly being replaced by single-use packaging such as PET bottles and cans in South Korea's beverage container market.

The empty-bottle deposit regime posts a return rate of around 99 percent, yet the very glass bottle products the system depends on are shrinking in number.

According to a report released Sunday by the National Assembly Research Service — titled "Why Are Reusable Glass Bottles Being Replaced by Single-Use Containers? Limitations of the Empty-Bottle Deposit Regime and Ways to Expand Beverage Container Reuse" — the volume of glass bottle products shipped fell about 33.4 percent, from about 5.619 billion bottles in 2003 to about 3.742 billion bottles in 2025.

Because the return rate is calculated as the share of shipped containers that are returned, a decline in the denominator — total shipments — can push the rate higher. The empty-bottle deposit regime has succeeded in recovering the containers it ships out, but the erosion of the reusable glass bottle market itself has been obscured behind the return-rate figure.

Meanwhile, the shift to single-use packaging is accelerating across beverage categories.

In the soju market, the share of glass bottle products fell from 82.9 percent in 2018 to 77.0 percent in 2022, while PET soju rose from 16.1 percent to 22.2 percent over the same period. In the beer market, glass bottles dropped from 39.8 percent to 28.1 percent, while cans climbed from 36.7 percent to 46.3 percent. In the soft drink market, PET bottles accounted for 44.8 percent of the market as of 2022.

The shared-return bottle system is also weakening. Shared-return bottles are standardized empty containers that two or more liquor manufacturers have agreed to use jointly.

The green soju bottle is the most prominent example. The 360-milliliter green shared-return bottle, operated under a voluntary industry agreement since 2009, saw its share fall 20 percentage points — from 99 percent in 2018 to about 79 percent in 2025 — while non-shared-return bottles expanded from 1 percent to 21 percent.

As the standardization base weakens, reusable glass containers in South Korea are reused an average of only about 8 to 14 times, far short of the 40 to 50 times achieved in Germany, meaning the system's environmental potential is not being fully realized, the report said.

Other countries have written a reuse-first principle directly into law.

The EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, which took effect in February 2025 and applies broadly from August 2026, sets binding targets for member states requiring that 10 percent of beverage packaging be reusable by 2030 and 40 percent by 2040.

Germany's Packaging Act enshrines a 70 percent reusable beverage container target in Article 1 of the law and backs it with a layered set of policy tools: a tiered deposit system (0.25 euros for single-use containers, 0.08 to 0.15 euros for reusable ones), mandatory retailer stocking requirements, and regular statistical reporting by the Federal Environment Agency.

The report put forward five legislative policy recommendations: codifying a reuse-first principle, enshrining a reusable-share target management system in law, strengthening standard container designation, introducing impact assessments for shifts to single-use packaging, and diversifying return infrastructure.

Kim Gyeong-min, a legislative researcher at the National Assembly Research Service and the report's author, said "the original purpose of the empty-bottle deposit regime is reuse, and we can no longer ignore the erosion of the reusable container market taking place behind the facade of high return rates." Kim added that "the current empty-bottle deposit regime must not remain merely a system for recycling plastic bottles more efficiently — it needs to shift toward actively preventing reusable glass containers from being replaced by single-use packaging such as PET bottles and cans."