Simple question about recycling

[santiago]

This has puzzled me for ages. Alot of you would remember the days when coke bottles came in those delicious 1 litre glass bottles and as a kid you would take them into the local deli and get 20c, which was basically kiddy currency. Sometimes we would even knock on a door as lots of houses used to neatly stack them near their side area.

But that was then and this is now. Every bottle for decades has had the ol " 10c at refund depots only when sold in SA" I investigated this about 5 years ago and there was some political play at work but i think its bad really.

Here we are being told to recycle right and every single bottle or can that has a 5c or 10c refund caption has already been marked up by the company to cover that 10c. So in effect you are paying 10c on every can and bottle on top of retail because down the line somebody else regains that 10c through recycling. For example a 30 can block of beer would be $3 on top. Therefore its really only $27 because they have already covered future recycling. Thats a whopping 10% we pay on top, but if you dont live in SA...............then every single can and bottle you buy, the 10c cream you have paid on top for nothing basically goes to the big recycling giants as pretty much a never ending profit on your already spent dollars.

So besides that in itself which i find highly dubious at best, surely in modernised country like Australia only sold in SA for recycling is a bit archaic. Looking into it further the big companies who produce cans etc heavily stop the government from allowing other states to pay citizen recylers like you and me so that some kind of recycling duopoly can be maintained. But the point is that we each pay 10c on top of every can sold, so basically were being rorted.

Basically every state should be able to participate in paid can and bottle recycling to the individual right? It could only be a positive thing. recycle your 30 can block of beer and the price reduces from $30 to $27. People would be cleaning rubbish of streets for free, people would feel like they are getting value and education through personal recycling and more to the point if i recycled my own wastage i think i would at least be a few hundred dollars better of financially per year. Screw the political tax breaks and individual spending to prop the economy. $200 dollars per individual times 20 million people for example is 40 billion dollars of citizen spending potential increased..............40 billion is the tip of the iceberg, you paid that already when you purchased a bottle. Who gains most from that forgotten paid money.

Simply i put and want to explore why every state does not have what SA has?

[random]

People would be cleaning rubbish of streets for free, people would feel like they are getting value and education through personal recycling and more to the point if i recycled my own wastage i think i would at least be a few hundred dollars better of financially per year

There is one woman who raids my home recycling bin for plastic bottles etc every week, she walks into my yard and helps herself. LOL

Which is fine because the council get the money otherwise and I think she uses it to fund her small gambling habit.

There are heaps of locals who do it on foot and by bike, they raid all the bins at the local shops too.

My kids tell me their father recently got $200 back from half a years worth of beer bottles at the recycling depot.

But yeh living in SA has to be good for something.

[Quill]

After a house party you can afford another slab

[Jonstn]

I also wonder why the rest of the states don't do it, if anything it keeps the bums busy, me any my partner were shocked when we went to Sydney and saw all the bums sitting around, head slouched holding a sign asking for money, I was wtfing for ages until I realised they can't cash in cans.

You very very rarely see that down here, they are all going around picking up cans either off the ground or out the bin.

It sucks that they mark it up, not fair on everyone else that can't take em in.

[ballzac]

You can sell cans. Being aluminium they (well, the bottom part at least) have value as scrap metal. They're pretty light, so I'm sure you'd have to collect a shitload of them to get any real money, but 10c isn't much either.

Shit like this tend to be a swings and roundabouts kind of deal. I guarantee if they brought in a recycling bottle refund thing in other states, we would see an equivalent rise in the price. I'm not necessarily saying it's a bad thing though. If it gets people to recycle then I guess it would be good. Still, I don't know if I could be bothered collecting shit and taking it somewhere to recycle. I just wanna throw it in the recycling bin and forget about it.

[etherealdrifter]

I also wonder why the rest of the states don't do it, if anything it keeps the bums busy, me any my partner were shocked when we went to Sydney and saw all the bums sitting around, head slouched holding a sign asking for money, I was wtfing for ages until I realised they can't cash in cans.

You very very rarely see that down here, they are all going around picking up cans either off the ground or out the bin.

It sucks that they mark it up, not fair on everyone else that can't take em in.

 

speaking of bum cash, i was sitting on the ground outside coles the other day while me petal did the shopping - i was just stating a ride up the mountain and this really nice , kind ol' lady came up and offered me a 5'er. i instantlty declined but jumped up and helped with her bags to her car.

moral : beards pay mun

sorry for the tangent Santiago

[santiago]

tangents are cool with me etherealdrifter, im not a big stiggler for staying purely on one topic as one thing often leads to another.

meeks i know what you mean, kinda shopping trolley type street person persona is often related to the bottom rung type recyling, not cool at all if bins are getting raided and stuff, im more like why is it only SA.....why stricktly and for so long now only SA?

thats exactly what i mean quill, its already been paid for the extra slab as you bought the beer, by you not getting that extra slab of beer some huge corporation or council does. all good for paying for roads but in that regard its already a tax...you pay that you should have the ability to keep.

ballzac, yes you can sell copper and aluminium or scrap to those metal places but indeed i think its about a cent per can if your lucky, you cant sell bottles though. also the clause i find questionable "when sold in SA'' is a biggy for me, why only when sold in SA? why why why???

this is not a the dump yard thread, anybody can buy and sell anything for profit. more like.............you already pay that 10c on top, the rest of the world has a refund system.......i really just dont understand why you can only do it in SA. besides SA being not very heavily populated as it is, you think it would at least be "if sold in NSW" in fairness it should be everywhere and i want to now the politics of why it isnt when it seems so logical and sensible. smells a bit stinky to me.

[Psylo]

I don't know why soft drinks arent sold in reusable glass bottles, which still happens in many other countries (Beer Lao even reuse their beer bottles). Probably some stupid, irrelevant Health Dept law.

[Bread Filter]

I don't know why soft drinks arent sold in reusable glass bottles, which still happens in many other countries (Beer Lao even reuse their beer bottles). Probably some stupid, irrelevant Health Dept law.

 

I remember in the 80's in the US anything plastic that had been used as a soft drink/juice/whatever liquid foodstuff bottle couldn't be recycled. Don't know whether it's still the same.

Probably has something to do with piss jugs

[ballzac]

I don't know if it's a health dept thing, as there are companies that still do it. Swords comes to mind.

[ballzac]

Swords: Wine in Returnables

[sapito]

I remember when I was in south america that the fizzy drinks were almost all in glass bottle with crown seal caps and there was a significant price difference for drinking it there and leaving the bottle compared to taking the bottle home. Same with beer.

The street over there are often filthy as but i rarely saw glass bottle thrown on the ground. I guess even if someone does, someone else will pick it up to get some money back.

Im not sure the full details of how it works but i wondered why there wasnt something similar here.

[Jonstn]

Me and my partner went to parklife this year and they had a thing going where you could take your cans up to the recycling station and for every item you'd get a $1 token that you could use for booze or merch.

Was the cleanest festival I've been to and we both got a buttload of drinks and some merch each for free just by doing a sweep of the grounds the cashing in

They had a dollar tax on top of every drink but when theyre that expensive in the first place you don't even notice, plus there's still quite a few cans laying around to be picked up but they were never there for long, more festivals should pick this up IMO

[tripsis]

Every state should have a monetary value applied to recyclables. Even if the cost did increase by the same amount, not everyone would be cashing in on it, so those that did would still be able to make a buck (namely bums and other poor people). In the very least, it would be an incentive for people to recycle more, or would lead to more actually being recycled.

As for why companies don't reuse glass bottled, I'd say it's about money. It's probably cheaper to have new bottles manufactured than to obtain all the old ones, clean them and then reuse them. In East Africa, they basically won't let you leave the premises without first having returned the bottle!

[santiago]

seriously check this out

http://www.zerowaste.sa.gov.au/upload/facts-sheets/container_deposit_legislation_4.pdf

its coming in WA soon apparently

seems by the statement its a state legislation problem, realistically then the politicians of each states, must have not actioned or been made aware of public sentiment.

or have bigger fish to fry, i reckon most have just put it to the bottom of the too hard basket.

gees im stoked WA is coming...but when?

[OPP]

Me and my partner went to parklife this year and they had a thing going where you could take your cans up to the recycling station and for every item you'd get a $1 token that you could use for booze or merch.

Was the cleanest festival I've been to and we both got a buttload of drinks and some merch each for free just by doing a sweep of the grounds the cashing in

They had a dollar tax on top of every drink but when theyre that expensive in the first place you don't even notice, plus there's still quite a few cans laying around to be picked up but they were never there for long, more festivals should pick this up IMO

 

Last year I got free tickets to a festival in Newcastle that had the same program. I reckon I made over $200 that day. Most of it I paid back in for drinks but I ended up leaving with more money than I went in with!!!

[Jonstn]

Oh nice nice that's even better then dollar tokens!! We still got about 20 laying around and now they're nothing but a momento.

We won the tickets to such a cheap day it was bangin!

[Francois le Danque]

what gets me is not WHY other states dont have it and WHY 'only when sold in SA' (even though those are perfectly good questions... ), but HOW they know things were sold in SA?? do people who live near the border drive truckloads of counterfeit SA-sold bottles??

[ballzac]

Isn't that a Seinfeld episode?

[occidentalis]

Why is it only SA that has a container deposit fee?

Because the soft drink industry sponsors local governments in other states to do kerb side recycling.

The soft drink companies believe that it is actually cheaper for them to subsidise local governments to collect your recycling and recycle it than it would be to have a container deposit, and they lobby hard at the state gov. level to ensure this stays the case.

Here's an example of a soft drink industry website set up to fight the idea in the NT http://www.responsiblerecycling.org.au/

There are plenty more. There was a four corners doco about this a while ago.

[Distracted]

what gets me is not WHY other states dont have it and WHY 'only when sold in SA' (even though those are perfectly good questions... ), but HOW they know things were sold in SA?? do people who live near the border drive truckloads of counterfeit SA-sold bottles??

 

Last time i dropped bottles off I had to sign a form stating they were all bought in SA and it had fines imposed for those who brought in cans from interstate.