Every deposit is a unit of value that enters the system, circulates from hand to hand, pools where cans pile up, and is redeemed. Model it like money: a supply, a velocity, reservoirs and leakage. Then move the levers and watch it flow.
One deposit is one kaucja unit, worth 0,50 zł, redeemable on return. The supply in circulation is every deposit not yet redeemed.
A unit moves from shop to home to return point and back. The faster it cycles, the more work each deposit funds in a year.
Units pile up where cans do: in homes, in bags, at hubs, and, when never returned, in a growing pool of unredeemed deposits.
Start with what actually happens on the ground: cans in a bag, trips a courier makes, couriers on shift, days a week. Watch it scale up to a day, a week, a month and a year. Figures are illustrative.
A deposit is minted the moment a drink is sold. That is new kaucja supply, held against the container until it comes back.
Households hold most of the live supply. CAN IT! bags and hubs move a slice of it quickly, which is where velocity, and wages, come from.
Returned units are redeemed and the loop closes. Unreturned units accumulate as a permanent unredeemed pool, the cost of every can that never comes back.
Model is illustrative. It builds from the ground up: cans per bag, times trips, times couriers, times days, and every can carries a 0,50 zł deposit split 50/50 into a wage and the loop.
Because a kaucja unit sidesteps the ZUS, health, income-tax and VAT wedges, it does the economic work of about 0,90 zł of ordinary gross pay, roughly 1,80× per złoty. Adjust the wedges and watch the multiplier move.
Taken off gross pay at the margin. The kaucja unit never enters payroll, so it is never charged.
Levied on ordinary income, avoided entirely because a returned deposit is not employment income.
Under the model, kaucja spending is VAT-exempt for the holder, lifting the equivalent from 0,73 to 0,90 zł.
Hypothetical model. The assumptions are not a statement of current Polish tax law and this is not tax or legal advice. Marginal-income model, 12% PIT bracket, employer-side contributions not included.
CAN IT POLAND LIMITED is incorporated in Hong Kong, so the statutory accounts are prepared and presented in Hong Kong dollars. Every transaction underneath them happens in złoty: a can is picked up in Kraków, a deposit of 0,50 zł is redeemed, a courier is paid in złoty. The kaucja never moves. The currency it is reported in does.
Exchange rates are National Bank of Poland table A mid-rates for HKD, 1 260 daily observations from 20 Aug 2021 to 19 Aug 2026, averaged by month for the charts; the headline high, low and spread are daily figures. Currency treatment is described in general terms and is illustrative of the model, not a statement of the company's filed accounts, and not accounting, tax or legal advice.
Look again at the second chart. For five years a 0,50 zł kaucja has hovered around one Hong Kong dollar — never below 0,78 HKD, never above 1,11 HKD, and inside ten percent of parity on four days in every five. It is a coincidence of two floating currencies rather than a peg, but it is a useful one: one can returned is, near enough, one dollar on a card. That is what makes a Hong Kong prepaid Mastercard programme fit the loop so neatly. The company's books, the card float and the unit a team member actually earns are all the same size.
A card is issued to the person, not to a credit history. No branch appointment, no minimum balance, no account refused because of an address or a gap in employment. Wages land on the card as soon as a bag is counted, and the balance reads in the same units the work was measured in.
It is a Mastercard, so it works in any shop or online checkout that takes one, and at any ATM for cash. No voucher scheme, no company shop, no restriction on what a person may buy. Take-home is real money, spendable the same way everyone else's is.
Prepaid means it holds a balance and cannot go negative: no overdraft, no interest, no debt, no fee for being poor. The holder sees every deposit arrive in the app and decides what happens next. Freeze it, check it, spend it — the money is under the earner's control, not the employer's.
The closeness above is an observed relationship between two floating currencies, not a fixed rate: the złoty and a HKD that is itself pegged to the US dollar. It drifted to 0,78 HKD through the 2022 złoty weakness and can drift again, so a card balance is not a claim on a fixed number of kaucja. A card used in Poland still converts to złoty at the network rate when it is spent — the near one-to-one makes the unit legible and the accounting clean, it does not remove the conversion. Card issuing is a regulated activity in both Hong Kong and the EU; this describes the model, not a product on sale today.
Every unit you send round the loop is a wage. Put yours to work.