E-Malt.com News article: Germany: German court orders deposit on border beer cans

A regional administrative court in Schleswig has ruled that shoppers from Scandinavia must also pay Germany’s deposit on single-use beverage cans in stores along the German-Danish border, a decision that could affect a long-running cross-border trade model built around low-tax beer and soft drinks, Vinetur reported on May 20.

The court said the deposit requirement does not violate Germany’s constitution or European law and applies in border shops just as it does elsewhere in the country. An exception, the judges said, exists only for direct exports of single-use beverage packaging. That means the practice of letting mostly Danish customers sign export declarations saying they will consume the drinks outside Germany cannot be used to avoid the deposit, because the goods are still being sold to end consumers and those declarations cannot be effectively checked.

The ruling is not yet final. The Schleswig-Flensburg district, which had been sued by the German Environmental Aid group, or DUH, can appeal to the Higher Administrative Court within one month.

DUH filed its lawsuit in April 2021 after the district did not act on a request from January 2021 to stop what the group said was a violation of Germany’s packaging law. The organization argued that border shops were selling cans without charging the deposit even though many of those drinks were later taken into Denmark.

Barbara Metz, a managing director at DUH, called the ruling a breakthrough because it declares a decades-old practice of selling deposit-free beverage cans in border trade with Denmark to be unlawful. The group has long argued that the system encourages waste and pollution, especially in Denmark’s coastal and rural areas, where environmental groups say many discarded cans originate from German border shopping.

For people living in the region, the trade has become routine. Danish customers often drive across the border with empty cars and return with trunks and trailers filled with beer and soda cans. Others take day trips on the Rødbyhavn-Puttgarden ferry and stock up at border shops. Under current practice, customers who fill out export paperwork can take the cans home without paying German or Danish deposit charges. Germany also taxes alcohol less heavily than Denmark, which helps make the shopping trips attractive.

The border trade is an important business for Schleswig-Holstein, with annual sales of about 1.2 billion euros and more than 3,000 jobs tied to it. But environmental groups have said that more than 650 million cans from northern German border trade end up in Denmark each year, and that many are not recycled properly or are thrown away. In 2020, conservation groups said as many as nine out of 10 cans found in Danish nature came from Germany.

The dispute has been going on for years. In 2015, environment ministries in Copenhagen, Berlin and Kiel signed an agreement intended to end the practice by 2018, but that plan was never carried out. The issue later moved through European institutions, including the European Commission and the Court of Justice of the European Union. In 2023, the EU court ruled that shops at the Danish border could continue selling drinks without a deposit if they were meant for export to Denmark.

The European Parliament then approved a new packaging regulation in April 2024 that will require deposits on single-use beverage packaging across all EU countries starting in 2029. Under that rule, German cans sold across borders would also have to carry Germany’s deposit.

A court spokeswoman said the DUH case was heard only now because it had been assigned to one of the court’s most heavily burdened chambers, which handles both a high volume of cases and unusually complex legal questions.


21 May, 2026