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Campaign to Protect Rural England says initiative to recycle more tins, bottles and plastic containers using deposits would be largely self-funding and could achieve 90% return rate

Making consumers pay a refundable deposit for plastic and glass bottles and aluminium cans would increase recycling rates and reduce litter, the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) said today.

Under its proposed deposit refund scheme, anyone buying a container smaller than 500ml would pay a 15p deposit, or 30p for larger capacity items, which would be refunded when the container is returned to a shop or collection point. Such a scheme could achieve 90% return rates, the campaigners claim.

Environmental and anti-litter charity calls for a new scheme that part of his campaign stop Drop against litter and fly-tipping, arguing that it would help the government work towards its "zero waste" economy, encourage councils to pay people to recycle and work to reduce littering.

Bill Bryson, CPRE president, said: "These findings throw rational and informed light on an issue that is nonsensically contentious in the UK. What sensible nation would not want to capture and recycle its precious and finite resources? What discerning people would not want to enjoy a litter-free environment? "

David Cameron, asked yesterday in parliament what he thought of introducing such a scheme, said: "Bill Bryson has made this suggestion to me as well because of the success schemes like this have had in other countries." He said he would ask environment secretary Caroline Spelman and climate secretary Chris Huhne to "look at this issue and see if we can take it forward."

The report, entitled Have we got the bottle? Implementing a deposit refund scheme in the UK, also suggests revenues would go a long way to covering the scheme's costs. While the initiative would cost £84m to create, the CPRE said, it could save local authorities £160m per year in waste management costs.

The running costs of the scheme are projected to be about £700m per year. At a return rate of 24bn containers, in line with the 90% level achieved by some European schemes, there would remain £491m in unclaimed deposits to support the running costs. The outstanding £212m would be met by drinks manufacturers, which might in turn pass the cost on to consumers.

Bottle deposits were common in the UK 20 years ago but fell out of favour when plastic bottles and cans became cheap to make and discard. However, deposit schemes still exist elsewhere in Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and Israel, and they provided the basis for some of the research by Eunomia Research & Consulting, which was commissioned by the CPRE.

Samantha Harding, the CPRE's Stop the Drop campaign manager, said: "The UK has a serious litter problem and the year-on-year increase in the cost of clearing it up has become unsustainable. We need to look at new ways of tackling litter and changing behaviours. Our research shows that a deposit refund scheme would reduce litter and increase rates of recycling, while at the same time reducing public sector spending on waste."

Drinks manufacturers generally oppose the idea - mainly on cost
grounds - although the debate knew going in that
could lead to regional trials. The British Retail Consortium (BRC)said the revival of old-style schemes actually undermine existing recycling threat to achieving economy of local collections of kerbside. Bob Gordon, the British Retail Consortium Head of Environment, said: "This is the pink eyes of nostalgia for the days when you got
Penny back on the pop bottle will not solve the problem. Customize the whole
The new infrastructure will be expensive because the waste bottle and
cans are not the issue. The next big target for raising recycling
rates is rigid plastics - tubs, pots and trays."

The British Soft Drinks Association said in a statement: "The CPRE
report bears out our view that a deposit scheme would be an extremely
expensive way to try to cope with the problem of garbage and
recycling. More than 70 per cent of soft drinks packaging is disposed
of at home, so the best thing to do is to collect materials for
recycling from kerbside. Figures from the return on show that last year,
the amount of plastic bottles collected through kerbside collection
increased by 27 percent. "

Defra said it welcomed the report and would consider the idea as part of its ongoing waste review.