“Donate Your Bottle Deposit”

For five years now, passengers have been able to donate their no longer needed deposit bottles for a good cause: The “Donate Your Bottle Deposit” campaign started in May 2017 at the former Tegel Airport and was then extended to Schönefeld Airport. Since October 2020, the containers have been located in the terminals at Berlin Brandenburg Airport. So far, a total of around 650,000 euros worth of deposits have been collected at all three airports. The money was donated exclusively to the Berliner Tafel food bank. Despite the Corona pandemic and the associated drastic drop in passenger numbers, around 50,000 euros have been collected for Berliner Tafel since BER opened.  

 “Donate Your Bottle Deposit” is a cooperation between Grüner Punkt, the education and employment provider Goldnetz gGmbH, Berliner Tafel e.V. and Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg GmbH. So-called “deposit officers” from Goldnetz gGmbH empty and clean the containers and sort the empties. In this way, 23 jobs have been created so far for the long-term unemployed. Grüner Punkt takes care of the logistics, i.e. it takes care of the transport and recycling of the bottles and ensures that the deposit money is collected. Since 2019, Coca-Cola Germany has been involved in the project with an annual donation of 30,000 euros.

In addition to Berlin, the campaign has been running for several years at seven other, mainly smaller airports. A total of ten million plastic bottles were collected in this way throughout Germany. At the three sites Tegel, Schönefeld and BER alone, around 2.6 million returnable bottles were collected and recycled. 

The information published on this page is correct as of the publication or revision date.