Bottle Refunds and Wastage...

November 1st, Queensland started a bottle refund scheme. You return your bottles, cans and glass and receive 10 cents for each return. This gave us an idea, go to the local mall and start digging for dimes, in my head 10 cents will always be a dime. The coffee drinks are the most popular, second are Coke products and various flavoured milks. What we've noticed in almost a month of collecting is the amount of wastage out there. People will pay between $3-$6 for some of these drinks and they will toss them in the trash half empty. We found a bottle of diet Coke 3/4 full, if that was mine it would have been fully drank. I can't afford to throw out that much liquid gold, it is my favorite drink after all.We've found half drunk orange juices, waters, teas, sodas, even those ready to drink alcoholic beverages, like rum and coke in a can. If we see a can or bottle on the side of the road, we will stop the car if it's safe and pick it up, hey you don't find 10 cents lying on the ground everywhere now do you? All drink companies have raised their prices but not just the ten cents, some have gone up 20, which I think is utterly ridiculous!

There are a few options to return your recyclables, the one I love is the reverse vending machine. I'm used to this as NY has had them for years, but these are better! They also have places you can drop it off and they'll count it for you, um, no I want to do the counting.  One machine takes only glass, the other machine takes plastic, cans and flavoured milk cartons and juice boxes. This is a great idea compared to what I'm used to with plastic, glass and cans having to be put into separate machines.  Also unlike NY reverse vending machines, you can get a cash voucher or you can set up a PayPal account and have the money transferred into your bank account almost the same day except on weekends where you need to wait till Monday. The cash vouchers can only be used at one supermarket which kind of sucks if you don't have one nearby. The Tomra reverse vending machines are very popular, we stopped by the other week and there wasn't a parking spot to be found. It's fairly clean inside with people always coming in. This is a great way to clean up the streets and earn some spare money, boy do we need it.