Although recycling beverage packaging is increasingly important to reduce pollution and advance the circular economy, return rate targets are rarely achieved. In this exploratory research, which includes a case study guided by the PM2 model, we investigate how process mining can be applied to identify constraints in the consumer process of deposit beverage packaging. To collect data, participants were asked to manually log their activities with deposit beverage packages. Our analysis, based on 74 collected cases, distinguished two cycles: short (process completion within 8 h) and long (process completion after 8 h). Within this distinction, descriptives show that the consumer-end process in short-cycles primarily leads to disposal, whereas in long-cycles it tends to result in the return of the packaging. These findings suggest that the short-cycle consumer process of deposit beverage packaging is an important constraint that limits the total return rate within our sample. Our case study gives rise to a novel approach to process mining that can help overcome some of the current pitfalls in process mining: Human-Logged Process Mining (HLPM). Our case study, together with our HLPM approach, show how process mining can contribute to the enhancement of a circular economy.