Providing employees with water is a fundamental obligation of every employer under occupational health and safety rules. In certain conditions, such as high temperatures or increased physical exertion, the employer must also provide drinks enriched with mineral salts and vitamins (isotonic drinks).
Employers fulfil these obligations, among other ways, by making bottled drinks available to employees. From 1 October 2025 these will be covered by the deposit return scheme. When purchasing such drinks, employers will be subject to the same rules as other customers: they will have to pay a deposit, which for plastic bottles is PLN 0.50 per package.
Must an employer charge a deposit when providing drinks?
The employer will have no such obligation because it is treated as an end user purchasing products for consumption by its employees.
An exception appears to be where (i) the employer itself manufactured drinks in packaging covered by the deposit return scheme, or (ii) an external supplier manufactured those drinks to the employer’s order and under its brand, and no deposit was paid on those products at any stage.
In these cases, the employer will be regarded as placing products on the Polish market within the meaning of the regulations governing the deposit return scheme, because it makes them available to its employees for consumption for the first time in Poland. Such an entity should therefore fulfil all statutory obligations and, where the products are covered by the deposit return scheme, pay the deposit to the scheme operator. Adopting the opposite interpretation for these exceptions would create a significant loophole, allowing deposits to be refunded although they had never been collected at any stage of distribution.
With the introduction of the deposit return scheme, employers should already consider solutions enabling them to recover deposits paid, including planning the logistics of returning bottles to the appropriate points. Alternatively, they could consider replacing bottled drinks with fixed water dispensers, which have already become a fixture in many workplaces.
Find out more about the deposit return scheme.
