At a German checkout, many single-use drinks add a separate €0.25 deposit, which the buyer can reclaim by returning the empty container correctly. Since 29 May 2005, this rate has applied to single-use drink containers holding 0.1 to 3 litres. Deposit-required single-use bottles and cans bought in Germany have carried the Deutsche Pfandsystem GmbH logo since 1 January 2003.
For daily shopping, the key distinction is between single-use and reusable containers. Single-use packaging, often plastic, aluminium, or composite material, is filled once and is usually crushed or otherwise destroyed after it goes through a return machine, then recycled as material. Reusable containers, generally made of glass, hard plastic, or metal, can be washed and filled again. Their deposit is not set by law, so the amount varies, unlike the standard €0.25 single-use deposit.
Most shoppers return empties to a reverse-vending machine in a shop and receive the deposit back. Since 1 May 2006, shops selling deposit-required single-use drinks must accept containers made from the material types they sell, although shops with less than 200 square metres of sales area have exceptions. The system was introduced after the share of reusable drink packaging nationwide fell below 72 percent after 1997; the single-use deposit began on 1 January 2003 for selected drink categories.
Paying a deposit does not necessarily mean that a shopper has chosen a reusable bottle. In a 2010 TNS-Emnid survey, about half of consumers believed a deposit meant they were buying an environmentally friendly reusable bottle, and a study commissioned by the Environment Agency recommended clearly marking €0.25 containers as single-use. In 2019, 94 percent of the 390,000 tonnes of collected PET bottles were recycled, though the environmental comparison between single-use and reusable deposits remains disputed.