Cash for cans

Ed, It’s great to see ‘The Independent’ getting behind our local communities in their enthusiasm for our State Government’s ‘Earn and Return’ program for eligible bottles and drink cans. According to the Boomerang Alliance, a community lobby group that has worked so hard for many years for such an initiative in our State, 100 million beverage containers have already been returned for a refund in the first three months of this valuable anti-litter program. I’m delighted local residents are pestering our council to find out where Return and Earn collection points are located. This shows that our communities really want to Return and Earn from their recyclables. The slow ramp up of this program has been criticised; but every similar program around the world has taken time for successful infrastructure to be put in place. It’s great that now so many people want to ‘Do the Right Thing’ to cut the amount of visible rubbish littering our streets, parks and beaches; this is something many tourists to our beautiful Clarence Valley will appreciate. China has just stopped buying Australia’s low value contaminated recyclables, so the introduction of our State Government’s Return and Earn litter reduction program couldn’t have been introduced at a better time. And because our Return and Earn recyclables are of high quality and contamination-free, markets are being found for these valuable resources. As an older local this important initiative takes me back to “the good old days” of my distant youth, before the days of single-use plastic bottles, when we use to pick up those valuable refillable glass bottles, cash them in and save up for a ticket to the cinema and a wonderful chocolate ice block. So many thanks to the Boomerang Alliance and to our State government for embracing a Return and Earn program that shows our children that we adults do care about their future. Harry Johnson, Iluka