Return and burn (cash)

BAGS of cans and bottles in a ute parked at the front of the courthouse

The Return and Earn recycling scheme is getting more farcical by the week.

The ordinary people paying through the neck to fund the scheme are then doing 90 per cent of the work, taking their cans and bottles to machines which are often broken down or full, and not even getting all their money back, despite those millions of dollars of labour and fuel.

Making things worse, because these machines only accept receptacles in perfect condition, you can’t save up a year’s supply of crushed cans and go down to do it one time, the bottles and cans just take up far too much space.

From what I’ve seen, the corporates making all the money don’t even seem to have a requirement to do their job properly, they’ve got unreliable machines and far too few trucks and drivers.

So where was the state government’s risk-management policy at work in this case?

And all that money goes out of town, to the big end of town.

If the NSW government had given this scheme to community groups, there would have been recycling centres set up all over the place which would have been staffed by humans.

You could have crushed your cans and brought them in knowing that you wouldn’t have to come back 50 times because of technical issues.

These depots would have seen many people who have been unable to find or retain jobs all of a sudden in full-time, sustainable employment, and that would have meant hundreds if not thousands of extra people in the workforce, paying taxes and otherwise contributing.

I took a picture of someone carrying around a heap of recyclables in the back of their ute when it was parked out the front of Dubbo Courthouse – which made me wonder if there could be a legal