In order to encourage recycling, drinks containers here come with a 5c returnable deposit. Rather than hand them in to a person in exchange for money, there is a mechanised return system. In the lobby of the supermarket there's a row of machines labelled for glass, plastic or cans. You pop your container in, the machine rolls it around until it can read the barcode, then sucks it to the back where it drops out of sight and a small screen tells you how much you are owed. How simple and convenient!Yeah, right. Half the time the machine can't read the barcode and spits the can back at you. Or if you try to hurry it, it flashes grumpy messages at you, such as "One at a time!" and "Don't throw!" and "No profanities!"
After half an hour of trying to feed our machine, using up heaven knows how much electricity in our effort to do right by the planet, we were still left with a boxful of cans that it wouldn't accept. Luckily, a man is employed to hang around by the machines to sort out such problems. He gave us a store credit note for 37 cans, opened up the machine and tipped in the empties in one swift electricity-saving move.
The miracles of modern science!
ReplyDeleteIf we had one of those machines people would try to put their old mattresses in it![like they do at the bottle bank]