Reverse Vending Machines, the UK Deposit Return Scheme, and the Cellular Connectivity Challenge That Will Define the Rollout
From October 2027, tens of thousands of RVMs will go live across UK retail and public spaces under Exchange for Change. Every single one needs a reliable, secure, remotely manageable data connection – and in most locations, only cellular will deliver it.
The UK Deposit Return Scheme launches in October 2027, requiring retailers to deploy reverse vending machines (RVMs) for container collection and deposit refunds. Each RVM is a connected device that needs always-on cellular connectivity for payment processing, telemetry, remote management, and reporting to Exchange for Change. Industrial-grade routers with dual-SIM failover, VPN security, and remote management capability are the foundation of a deployment that will scale to thousands of sites nationwide.
Contents
- What is Exchange for Change?
- The scale of the UK RVM deployment
- What an RVM actually needs from its connection
- Why cellular is the only practical answer at scale
- What to look for in a router for RVM deployment
- Milesight routers: the case for this hardware
- SIM strategy for a UK-wide RVM fleet
- Antenna considerations for in-cabinet installations
- Getting the hardware: Routerstore.com
What is Exchange for Change?
The UK Deposit Return Scheme – formally named Exchange for Change – launches on 1 October 2027 across England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales. The core mechanism is straightforward: consumers pay a small deposit (expected to be 20p per container) when purchasing drinks in single-use PET plastic bottles or aluminium and steel cans between 150ml and 3 litres. That deposit is refunded when the empty container is returned to a designated collection point.
The scheme is administered by the UK Deposit Management Organisation (UK DMO), a not-for-profit body appointed in May 2025 and responsible for managing deposits, reimbursements, logistics, and reporting across all participating retailers, producers, and return-point operators. England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are excluding glass from the initial rollout; Wales has secured an exemption from UK Internal Market Act provisions that allows it to include glass in its parallel scheme from 2027, with a full glass deposit from 2030.
The legislative basis is the Deposit Scheme for Drinks Containers (England and Northern Ireland) Regulations 2025, with Scotland’s equivalent amended in June 2025 to align with the England and Northern Ireland framework. Producer and retailer registration with Exchange for Change opens in late 2026.
The ambition behind the scheme is significant. UK consumers currently purchase around 14 billion plastic drinks bottles and 9 billion cans annually, with approximately 6.5 billion containers going to landfill or becoming litter rather than being recycled. The DRS targets a 90% return rate on in-scope containers by 2030 – a target that requires not just legislation but physical infrastructure capable of handling the volume.
DRS for drinks containers operates alongside Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for packaging, which places broader recycling obligations on producers. Producers of in-scope DRS containers are not liable for EPR local authority waste management fees from 2025 onwards – they fund DRS pre-implementation costs instead. This creates a direct financial incentive for producers to support rapid DRS infrastructure rollout.
The scale of the UK RVM deployment
Reverse Vending Machines are the primary infrastructure through which the DRS operates. An RVM is an automated collection kiosk that accepts empty containers, validates them by reading barcodes and checking physical characteristics, and issues a refund via cash, voucher, or digital credit. The machine records each transaction and reports return data to the DMO’s systems.
Every retailer that sells in-scope drinks is legally required to operate a return point. For retailers above 100 square metres of retail floor space in England, this is mandatory. Smaller retailers in urban areas may qualify for exemptions but can volunteer as return points and receive handling fees for doing so. Exchange for Change has committed £60 million in grants over the first three years to support small, independent retailers with RVM deployment costs.
Consider what this means in infrastructure terms. The UK has approximately 50,000 convenience stores, 6,000+ supermarkets and large grocery stores, and thousands of additional hospitality venues, transport hubs, and public spaces that may operate voluntary return points. Even a conservative estimate places the required RVM deployment in the tens of thousands of units. Some analysts put the realistic UK RVM estate at 30,000 to 50,000 machines once the scheme reaches steady state.
Every one of those machines is a connected device. And in the majority of locations – particularly convenience stores, petrol forecourts, community spaces, outdoor environments, and retail parks – a fixed broadband connection is either unavailable, impractical, or economically unjustifiable for a single kiosk installation.
What an RVM actually needs from its connection
It is worth being precise about what an RVM requires from its data connection, because the connectivity spec drives the hardware and SIM choices. An RVM is not simply a vending machine. It is a multi-function kiosk combining barcode scanning, mechanical sorting, payment processing, session management, reporting, and remote diagnostics. Each of these functions places its own demands on the connection.
Transaction and deposit processing
When a consumer returns a container and claims a cash or digital refund, that transaction must be processed in real time. Payment terminal compliance requirements mean this data exchange must be encrypted, low-latency, and PCI-DSS compliant where card or digital wallet refunds are involved. A dropped connection at point of refund creates a poor customer experience, potentially triggers a refund dispute, and risks non-compliance with scheme rules. Uptime is not optional here – it is a compliance requirement.
Telemetry and fill-level monitoring
Each RVM continuously reports fill levels, mechanical status, and operational health back to the operator’s management platform. This allows logistics teams to plan collection rounds efficiently – only dispatching vehicles when machines are approaching capacity, rather than on fixed schedules. Without reliable connectivity, this telemetry breaks down, collection rounds become inefficient, and machines go out of service because they fill up undetected. At scale, inefficient logistics can significantly erode the economics of running an RVM estate.
Reporting to Exchange for Change
Return-point operators are required to report container return data to the DMO. This includes the volume and type of containers accepted, the deposits refunded, and machine status information. This reporting underpins the financial reconciliation that determines handling fees and deposit reimbursements. Connectivity gaps mean reporting gaps, which in turn affect cashflow and scheme compliance.
Remote management and firmware updates
An RVM estate spread across thousands of retail locations cannot be managed by sending engineers to every machine. Configuration changes, software updates, barcode database updates (as new in-scope products are registered with the DMO), and fault diagnostics all need to happen remotely, over the machine’s cellular connection. This requires a router with robust remote management capability and a stable tunnel back to the operator’s management infrastructure.
An RVM is a payment device, a compliance reporting terminal, a logistics sensor, and a remotely managed kiosk – all in one. Its connectivity requirements are closer to those of an ATM or EPOS system than a consumer Wi-Fi device. The router and SIM specification needs to reflect this.
Why cellular is the only practical answer at scale
The assumption in many DRS planning documents is that RVMs will connect via the retailer’s existing broadband infrastructure. For large supermarkets with managed IT estates, this may be the path of least resistance. But the reality of the UK’s DRS geography makes this assumption fragile, and for the majority of the estate it fails entirely.
Broadband dependency creates single points of failure
Sharing a broadband connection with the retailer’s existing IT infrastructure introduces dependency on that retailer’s ISP, router, and LAN configuration. Any broadband outage, ISP maintenance window, or retailer IT change can take the RVM offline. The RVM operator has no control over the reliability of someone else’s network, but carries full responsibility for uptime under the scheme.
Many DRS locations have no viable fixed connection
A significant proportion of the UK’s in-scope return points – petrol station forecourts, standalone convenience units, superstore car parks, community recycling points, transport hubs – either have no practical way to run an Ethernet cable to an RVM position, or the cost of doing so makes it economically unviable for a single kiosk. Cellular solves this immediately. The router installs inside or adjacent to the machine, a SIM card provides connectivity, and no engagement with a landlord’s IT team or a telecoms installation contractor is required.
Cellular enables true fleet management
An RVM operator running 500 machines across multiple retail brands and building types needs consistent visibility across the entire estate. Cellular connectivity – with a common management platform – provides this. Each machine appears on the same dashboard regardless of whether it is in a Tesco Metro, a BP garage, or a standalone recycling kiosk in a shopping centre car park. Managing a mixed estate through retailers’ broadband connections is operationally fragmented in a way that cellular simply is not.
An RVM’s data throughput requirement is modest by 4G standards. Telemetry, transaction reporting, and remote management typically amount to a few hundred megabytes per month per machine under normal operation. LTE Cat 4 connectivity delivers far more capacity than RVM applications require – meaning the connection specification is about reliability and redundancy, not raw speed.
What to look for in a router for RVM deployment
Not every cellular router is appropriate for this application. Consumer-grade hardware is designed for domestic environments with human administrators on hand to reboot and reconfigure. An RVM router is installed inside a machine in a retail back-of-house space, managed entirely remotely, and expected to run continuously for years. The requirements are industrial.
| Requirement | Why it matters for RVM deployment |
|---|---|
| Dual SIM with automatic failover | If the primary carrier loses signal or degrades, the router switches to the secondary SIM without rebooting. Uptime is maintained without manual intervention. |
| Industrial operating temperature range | RVMs in outdoor positions, retail back-of-house spaces, or unheated buildings can experience wide temperature variation. Consumer routers operating outside -40°C to +70°C may fail or throttle. |
| Rugged metal enclosure (IP30 minimum) | In-cabinet installation means the router must tolerate vibration, dust, and mechanical environment of an operating vending machine. Plastic consumer hardware is not rated for this context. |
| VPN support (IPsec, OpenVPN, WireGuard) | Transaction data and payment terminal communications must traverse an encrypted tunnel. The router must support configurable VPN without specialist integration work. |
| Remote management platform | With potentially thousands of machines in the field, every configuration change, firmware update, and diagnostic must happen remotely through a centralised management console. |
| Serial interfaces (RS232/RS485) | RVM internal controllers commonly communicate over serial protocols. A router with native serial interfaces can interface directly with machine internals without an additional gateway device. |
| Watchdog and auto-recovery functions | If a process hangs or the cellular connection drops, the router must detect this and recover without a physical reboot. In an unmanned kiosk, there is no other option. |
| Wide input voltage range | Power supply inside vending machine cabinets is not always clean or regulated. A wide DC input range (typically 9-48V) allows the router to tolerate supply variation without damage. |
Milesight routers: the case for this hardware
Milesight’s industrial cellular router range – the UR series – is built specifically for unattended, remotely managed M2M and IoT deployments. The hardware specification maps directly onto the requirements of an RVM estate, and the management ecosystem makes operating a large distributed fleet practically viable. For operators planning a DRS connectivity rollout, the Milesight UR35 and UR75 are the two variants worth understanding.
Milesight UR35 – the baseline for most RVM deployments
The UR35 is Milesight’s Pro Series 4G LTE industrial router, and for the majority of UK RVM installations it will be the right choice. It integrates an embedded cellular modem with dual SIM slots, delivering LTE Cat 4 connectivity with 150 Mbps download and 50 Mbps uplink. That is substantially more than an RVM’s telemetry and transaction traffic will ever require – which means there is headroom for future applications such as digital display advertising, video-based container rejection logging, or machine learning-based maintenance prediction without hitting capacity constraints.
The UR35 carries five 10/100 Mbps Ethernet ports, RS232 and RS485 serial interfaces, and digital I/O ports – meaning it can connect directly to the RVM’s internal controller over the serial protocol the machine uses natively, without an intermediary device. DIN-rail mounting makes cabinet installation clean and secure, and the IP30-rated metal enclosure is appropriate for the mechanical environment inside an RVM.
The router’s operating temperature range of -40°C to +70°C means it will function reliably in outdoor machine positions through UK winters and in enclosed machine rooms during summer. The 9-48V DC power input tolerates the variable supply conditions found inside complex machine cabinets.
Security is handled through a full suite of VPN protocols – IPsec, OpenVPN, WireGuard, L2TP, PPTP, GRE, ZeroTier, and DMVPN – alongside ACL rules, firewall configuration, SYN-flood protection, and data filtering. For payment terminal data traversing a public cellular network, this is the minimum security baseline operators should require.
The UR35 includes an embedded Python development environment, allowing operators to run custom scripts on the router itself. For RVM operators with bespoke reporting requirements or integration needs with proprietary back-end platforms, this provides a lightweight edge computing capability without adding hardware.
Milesight UR75 – for higher-demand or future-ready deployments
The UR75 is Milesight’s 5G Ultra Series router. For RVM deployments at high-footfall locations – major transport hubs, large retail centres, or sites where the machine doubles as a digital advertising point – or for operators who want to avoid any mid-deployment hardware refresh when 5G deployment expands further across UK retail areas, the UR75 provides 5G Sub-6GHz connectivity alongside Wi-Fi 6 dual-band wireless.
It uses a Qualcomm quad-core ARM Cortex-A55 processor with 512MB RAM and 8GB flash, and retains the same dual-SIM failover, RS232/RS485 serial interfaces, digital I/O, GPS, and DIN-rail mounting that make the UR35 suitable for industrial applications. The UR75 also supports edge computing integration with Azure IoT Edge and AWS Greengrass natively, which is relevant for operators building cloud-connected analytics platforms on top of their RVM estate.
The UR75 supports both 5G SA (Standalone) and NSA (Non-Standalone) modes – important given that the UK’s 5G SA rollout is ongoing and network support varies by region and operator. An RVM deployed in 2027 needs to work on the network available at launch and take advantage of improved connectivity as it becomes available without requiring hardware replacement.
Milesight DeviceHub – the fleet management layer
Hardware alone does not make a large distributed RVM estate manageable. Milesight’s DeviceHub platform provides centralised remote management for all deployed UR-series routers, regardless of scale. Configuration deployment, firmware updates, network diagnostics, connectivity health monitoring, and alerting are all handled through a single console. For an operator managing 500 or 5,000 RVM connections, this is the layer that makes the difference between a manageable infrastructure and an operational nightmare.
DeviceHub supports bulk configuration management, which means deploying a firmware update or a VPN configuration change across an entire estate can be done in minutes rather than requiring engineer visits. When a connection issue is flagged on a specific machine, the diagnostic tools within DeviceHub allow the problem to be investigated and often resolved remotely before a physical call-out is needed.
For an RVM operator, the cost of a physical engineer visit to a single site is likely to exceed the cost of the router itself. A router with robust remote management capability – paired with a central fleet management platform – is not a premium feature. It is the basic requirement for deploying this type of estate economically.
SIM strategy for a UK-wide RVM fleet
The SIM choice for an RVM fleet is not simply a matter of finding the cheapest data tariff. Reliability, coverage consistency across the UK’s diverse geography, and operational flexibility across a multi-year deployment period all matter more than unit cost per megabyte.
Multi-network SIMs for coverage resilience
A single-network SIM locks each RVM to the coverage and reliability of one UK operator. In areas where that operator’s signal is weak or intermittent – and in many retail back-of-house environments, basement locations, or thick-walled older retail units, signal conditions can be challenging – the machine goes offline with no alternative. Multi-network or roaming IoT SIMs, which can connect to whichever UK operator provides the best signal at a given location, eliminate this dependency. Paired with the UR35’s dual-SIM failover, a machine carrying two multi-network SIMs on different underlying platforms has very strong resilience against connectivity loss.
For more detail on how multi-network SIMs work and how to evaluate them for UK IoT deployments, see the IoT SIM Explained guide on IoTPortal.
Private APN for secure transaction data
Payment terminal communications and deposit transaction data should not traverse the public internet without an additional application-layer security layer. A private APN – which routes the RVM’s data through a private MPLS or IPsec-tunnelled network directly to the operator’s back-end systems rather than through the public internet – provides network-layer isolation that complements the VPN tunnels configured in the router. This is standard practice for ATMs and EPOS systems, and RVM transaction data warrants the same treatment.
Static or private IP addressing
Remote management of the UR35 and UR75 is most reliable when each device has a consistent, addressable IP. With standard dynamic public IPs on cellular, incoming connections from the management platform require workarounds. A private static IP on a private APN – or a management-plane VPN that maintains consistent addressability regardless of cellular IP assignment – is the cleaner solution for a managed fleet. For a full treatment of public versus private IP addressing in cellular IoT, see the IoT Connectivity Guide.
Data volume budgeting
The low data consumption of a typical RVM – a few hundred megabytes per month for telemetry, transactions, and remote management – means data cost should not be the primary SIM selection factor. A low-cost SIM with unreliable coverage or restrictive fair-use policies is a false economy when an RVM going offline means failed transactions, a service complaint, and potentially a DMO reporting discrepancy. Selecting a commercial IoT data tariff with pooled data across the fleet and flexible overage terms is the appropriate approach.
Antenna considerations for in-cabinet installations
The cellular antenna is the component most often treated as an afterthought in machine connectivity deployments, and it is also one of the most common sources of poor signal performance and unexplained connectivity degradation. Inside an RVM, the antenna situation deserves specific planning attention.
An RVM is a metal cabinet. Metal enclosures attenuate cellular signals significantly – a router’s internal or stub antenna mounted inside a metal machine will deliver substantially worse signal than the same router installed in an open environment. The solution is an external antenna, routed through the machine cabinet or mounted externally, positioned to have line-of-sight or at least clear-path exposure to the cell network.
For most RVM installations, an omnidirectional external antenna rated for the relevant 4G LTE frequency bands (Bands 1, 3, 7, 8, and 20 cover the main UK operators across 800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, and 2100 MHz) mounted at the top of the machine or on an adjacent wall bracket is the practical choice. In locations with consistently poor signal, a directional antenna pointed at the nearest cell tower may improve throughput meaningfully. Both the UR35 and UR75 use standard 50 Ohm SMA connectors for their cellular antenna ports, so selecting and fitting an appropriate external antenna is straightforward.
For an overview of antenna types, installation considerations, and cable loss factors relevant to IoT deployments, the IoT Antenna Directory is a useful reference.
Cable run length between the router’s antenna port and the external antenna matters. Coaxial cable introduces signal loss – typically 0.2 to 0.5 dB per metre depending on cable type at LTE frequencies. Keeping cable runs short and using appropriate low-loss cable (LMR-195 or equivalent) avoids negating the benefit of external antenna placement. Long cable runs with cheap cable can leave the router’s effective signal level worse than a well-positioned stub antenna on the router itself.
Getting the hardware: Routerstore.com
For operators, systems integrators, and installation contractors working on DRS RVM deployments in the UK, Routerstore.com is a UK-based supplier of the Milesight industrial router range, including the UR35 and UR75.
Routerstore stock the full Milesight UR series and can advise on the right variant for specific deployment environments – whether that is the UR35 for a standard 4G LTE RVM installation, the UR75 for 5G-ready or higher-demand locations, or the appropriate accessories including external antennas, DIN-rail mounting kits, and power supply options. They carry product knowledge appropriate to commercial IoT and M2M deployments rather than consumer connectivity, which matters when specifying hardware for a scheme with the operational demands of Exchange for Change.
If you are scoping a DRS connectivity project – whether for a single-site trial or a multi-site estate rollout – Routerstore can provide hardware quotations and technical pre-sales guidance. Contact details are available at routerstore.com.