The Can and Bottle Bank

 I'm on a recycling kick. 

If I'm honest, it's something I believe in and participate in as much as possible. I've got a large bag of aluminium coffee pods waiting to go back to Nescafe. My rubbish is sorted and put in the correct bins. 

And today, for shits and giggles, I took two bags of cans to the recycling station just to see what it was like. The interwebs had been telling me of these new-fangled machines where you could recycle your cans and bottles. All they need is a recognisable bar code. Simples. 

In the scheme of things, returning around 40 cans to a machine which will give me a voucher for returning them seems like a fool's errand, but I was curious. I drink a bit of fluids which come out of cans. My nightly Sodaly. A bit of coke Zero... why shouldn't I return my cans and get 10 cents back on each. 

I also wanted to try the experience. 

A public holiday is a good day to do this, making my way to the recycling station in Camberwell. 

Things I found out. 

Lots of people do this. When I left, there were five people waiting patiently to use the machines - most, like me, had two or three shoppers with them. There was no average demographic - a young couple, a woman my age, a dad and his two kids were in the line.  

Well, there was a queue. I was first in the queue behind a family group who seemed to have five barbeques worth of bottles and cans in front of me. Also, there were two machines - one wasn't working. One was. 

It was a nice day, and a ten-minute wait with my audio book and some good pokemonning make the time go quickly. 

Finally, it was my time. I scanned the app. I put my cans and bottles in once at a time sending them down the scanning conveyor. Took all of about 5 minutes, a couple of cans came back - most went through on a second round - and at the end of it, I got a voucher that can be redeemed at Coles for about $4.00. 

Is this a worthwhile activity, collecting cans so that every few weeks I can go run them through the machine for a few buck - possibly not, but I like that I get my money back on the cans and save the funds, after a while, I could put the pin money towards something. 

I just think it's a worthwhile thing to do. The cans can live in my car boot until I send them on their way - and if I'm honest, coming from a state which has always had a 10 cent refund on cans, I never could work out why more places haven't done this to try to get more glass, aluminium and plastic back into the recycling arena. But as much as we've had this scheme, finding places to recycle has always been difficult and time consuming. 

I think I'll keep doing this, even if it's a just for me thing.  

Today's song: