INCENTIVE SHATTERED: Back in the old days, a mountain of scrap bottles like this could have made some lucky kid a millionaire.
INCENTIVE SHATTERED: Back in the old days, a mountain of scrap bottles like this could have made some lucky kid a millionaire.
Back in knee-high days, we had this wonderful market mechanism called bottle money.
This was being able to take empty glass (no plastic then) soft drink or beer bottles back to the shop or garage and get a payout — a big, bronzed penny for the long-necked brown beer bottles, or a tiny, silvery threepenny bit for the smaller, clear-glass soft drink bottles.
It was odd that a bottle half the size of its big beery cousin earned you three times more, especially given that the refund was also half the price of a whole new soft drink — but one didn't argue with market mechanisms.
Bottle money was a wonderful lesson in self-motivation and resourcefulness. On boring Sunday afternoons, with Nat King Cole's Silver Threads and Golden Needles playing on the Sunday Requests for the thousandth time, it was a no-brainer for a good keen cash-hungry boy to head out and hunt down a passel of them thar bottles.
Being out in the sticks somewhat meant pickings weren't quite as rich as for townie kids, but the country kid had natural cunning.
By the time you'd crawled under the local stockyard stands, scoured the adjoining river bank, then patrolled the roadside banks at a carefully calculated distance from the village store or local bowser station — distance calibrated on the average time it took for a thirsty motorist to polish off a soft drink and jettison the empty — you could generally rustle up enough refunds to bankroll some more goodies.
What a wonderful concept. Create an incentive for resources to be returned to source for recycling.
The idea was so good, being go-ahead New Zealanders we naturally had to abandon it. We're a world leader in not knowing a good thing when we see it. Except, even now, with all the rightful chatter about curbing plastic bags and whatnot, the big brown penny still hasn't dropped that it pays to pay.
Countries with a bit of nous like Norway, for example, have mechanised deposit machines that accept plastic bottles in return for tradeable credits. And have had for about the last 30 years.
Consequently, they have a plastic bottle return rate of about 97 per cent. I can't find NZ return-rate figures, but I suspect it would be about the same as the British rate of roughly 50 per cent, given Kiwis recycle only about a fifth of the overall plastic packaging they consume.
Last year New Zealand recycling companies sent 41 million kilograms of plastic waste overseas for recycling. Meanwhile, Norway is competing for international waste to use as cheap fuel for electricity generation. While this is not by any means ideal — given that producing such waste in the first place is best avoided — at least they're making the most of it in the meantime.
We, on the other hand, are not only crapping big-time in our own nest — the nest, remember, that's meant to be ever so cleanly green — but can't even get it together to recycle that waste to our own benefit.
Industry players insist that it's more "economic" to send waste overseas for recycling but, of course, narrow industry interests preclude factoring in such peripherals as creating local jobs and reducing carbon miles.
The planet's already being suffocated by plastic detritus. Recent studies in Britain showed a river near Manchester had more than 500,000 microplastic particles per square metre in the top 10 centimetres of river bed.
Frank Greenall
As we've already demonstrated with the rank degradation of our waterways, sadly we also don't seem to have too many reservations about trashing our environment if there's a buck in it.
Since we're meant to be some sort of exemplar — 100% pure and all that hokey — we should really make the effort, given tourism's almost as big a cash cow as the udder ones.
If nothing else, let's at least have plastic bottle recycle-for-refund machines. And guess what, just like the soft drink bottle returns, the payouts help finance the next round.
