With three Return and Earn depots opening in the Southern Highlands and another in Yass opening on Friday, Goulburnians are scratching their heads as to when the hub will see its own cash for container deposit open.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Liberal Member for Goulburn Pru Goward said she was disappointed that Goulburn did not receive a site in the initial rollout.
“There are collection points planned for Goulburn but they aren’t finalised yet,” Ms Goward said.
”I’m confident it will happen as soon as the initial and unavoidable glitches are ironed out. “
Under the scheme, the Southern Highlands has three collection points, two of which are in Mittagong and one in Moss Vale.
Other collection points in the region are at Yass and Queanbeyan.
Ms Goward said the relevant minister was “driving the issue really hard” and the rollout to other venues would be done “as soon as possible”.
Ms Goward praised the potential of the scheme.
“Forty-nine percent of litter by volume is made up of beverage containers – and 43 percent of the total volume is containers that will be caught by the scheme,” she said.
NSW Environment Minister Gabrielle Upton said the roll out was a massive exercise.
“There are plenty more to be installed across the state in the coming weeks as the rollout continues,” Ms Upton said.
Is there money to be made?
The NSW Government’s Return and Earn collection points open on Friday.
But one question remains, can you turn a profit from recycle cans nad bottles under the NSW government scheme.
One collection point is located at Vinnies in Moss Vale, while another two are located at Vinnies in Mittagong and Woolworths at Mittagong West.
Other towns in the region will need to drive their empty drink containers to one of these two reverse vending machines to collect their 10 cent refund on each bottle or can.
Like Seinfeld characters Kramer and Newman in The Bottle Deposit episode, we’ve crunched the numbers to find out just how many drink containers are required to turn a profit on the Return and Earn scheme.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the average rate of fuel consumption per passenger vehicle in the 2015-2016 financial year was 10.6 litres per 100 kilometres.
Over a 12 month period, Fuel Check recorded the average cost for unleaded 91 petrol to be 128.4 cents a litre in NSW.
Using these numbers, we can determine the average cost of travelling one kilometre is 13.6 cents.
To turn a profit on your trip to the reverse vending machine, you need to recycle at least 1.4 drink containers for every kilometre travelled.
This means a Goulburn resident would need to collect 97 drink containers to break even on the drive to Moss Vale’s collection point, or 194 drink containers to cover the drive home too.
