THE WA wine industry is calling on the state government to reconsider the introduction of the container deposit scheme (CDS), claiming it will put thousands of jobs at risk in what is widely considered the Australian wine industry’s most challenging time in history.

The Friends of WA Wine group says that the CDS, which is due to be implemented on July 1, will put WA producers at a serious disadvantage to those in other states where it is not scheduled to be introduced until 2027, placing an $11 million impost on the WA industry.

A spokesperson for the group said that WA was already a leader in sustainability in the wine industry, and implementing the CDS now would add considerable costs for little immediate environmental impact.

Participating consumers would receive a 10c refund for returning a bottle, but the complex layering of the Wine Equalisation Tax (WET) and GST, coupled with the added administrative, logistics and labelling costs, means the actual cost to all wine buyers in WA is estimated to be between $1.15 and $1.25 per bottle.

“The math simply does not add up for WA’s array of family winemakers or regionally-based producers,” WA wine critic and journalist Ray Jordan said.

“Wineries are being asked to implement a policy that targets less than 1 per cent of the state’s litter at an annual cost of up to $11m to the industry.

“This is a solution that costs far more than it is worth, putting 4000 regional jobs at risk for a mere 2 per cent projected increase in glass recovery. And wine drinkers lose out as producers have no choice but to pass on the costs of the scheme to keep business afloat,” Mr Jordan said.

A spokesperson said the industry is disappointed that despite approaches to the premier and environment minister, and the delivery of an open letter signed by 230 WA wine producers by the Wines of Western Australia Association, the government has failed to recognise the impact of introducing this scheme when the industry is already adjusting to declining global demand for wine and rising costs.

Among concerns is that it provides an unfair regional disadvantage as WA is implementing the scheme one year ahead of other states, leaving local producers with a disadvantage to eastern states' wineries that do not yet face these costs in an already challenging market.

“Unlike fast-moving consumer goods, wine is an agricultural product with aging cycles of up to five years, meaning the CDS adds significant upfront administrative and labelling costs years before revenue is realised,” a spokesperson said.

“There is currently no bottle manufacturing capacity in Western Australia which means all locally recovered glass must be sent to South Australia to be reconstituted back into glass bottles.

“Transporting this cullet creates challenges including additional transport costs and related emissions which threaten the long term viability of glass recovery through the current CDS framework.”

He said wine bottles represent less than 1 per cent of the WA litter stream as customers already use available mixed material recycling bins to recycle a majority of wine bottles with the proposed extension seeking only a two percentage point gain in recovery at a massive industry expense.

Western Australian winemakers are already national pacesetters on a variety of sustainability metrics, with the state currently boasting one of the highest adoption rates for the national Sustainable Winegrowing Australia program with 75 per cent of member wineries currently fully certified, significantly higher than the national average of 55 per cent.

The Friends of WA Wine are calling on the premier and the environment minister to pause the July implementation and engage in meaningful dialogue.