‘Where are my empty plastic bottles?’ I ran around the house screaming, after discovering my stash had disappeared.
The government in Ireland has done something with the recycling laws that has made people into wild-eyed scavengers. It has introduced a scheme whereby you can feed all your empty bottles and cans into a machine in the supermarket that crushes them down and spits out a voucher – by which I mean about 20 small plastic water bottles, for example, makes you two or three euros, which is enough for a coffee, a sandwich or some money off your shopping bill.
The government has done something with the recycling laws that has made people into wild-eyed scavengers
It’s not really a lot, obviously, but it’s just enough money to have made people lose their minds over it.
Lads can be seen rifling through public bins on high streets. Because I’m thrifty and like a bargain, I can be seen down the Centra in our West Cork village with bags full of these bottles I’ve collected, feeding them into the machine and gasping with delight when I get my slip of paper with a few euros on it. You have to spend these euros in the particular shop where you’re using the machine, but that doesn’t dim the joy of the situation one bit.
It’s all very nostalgic if, like me, you remember saving up R. White’s lemonade bottles and a man coming to collect them and giving you some coins. Coke bottles, too. The young enviro-warriors like to think they’ve reinvented the wheel but they really haven’t. When I was a child we recycled everything and it was much more exciting because it involved pocket money, so it’s great that Ireland is going back to those heady days of turning trash into cash.
Leo Varadkar, before he resigned for getting almost everything else wrong, did at least come up with this bottle-crushing idea, and I would have to hand it to him, it’s the dog’s do-dahs. So (leaving aside the immigration rows, and the riots, and the rejection of his attempt to edit the word ‘mother’ out of a Roman Catholic country’s constitution) he got something right. Or did he?
I was going great guns with it, then my parents were staying with us, and I had a huge bin-load of small water bottles saved up.
But one day they disappeared. I got all itchy-scratchy because, you have to understand, I am now thoroughly addicted to the process of feeding bottles into a machine and hearing the crunching, and getting my ticket. There’s a lovely pause where you wait for it to work out how much you’ve got and then it spits out the receipt… Ooh! Three euros and 50 cents! It’s exciting. Of course, I wouldn’t infer that living in the back of beyond at the tip of an Irish peninsula with nothing but cows for miles is boring, but I will say feeding bottles into a machine for a few euros passes as a day out.
So I ran round the house shouting at everyone about where my bottles had gone, because I was looking forward to taking them, and my father sloped out of the living room where he and my mother were busy boiling themselves alive, as old people do, with all the radiators full on and a roaring fire, and he said the fateful words: ‘Oh them? I burned them.’
My father is a liberal leftie who bangs on about the environment, Gaza, Ukraine, ‘our NHS’, the lot. And there he was, burning plastic in my fireplace.
I went berserk and gave him a stern lecture, which he declared himself totally unbothered by because he’s used to ignoring me, because I’m a mad anti-vax conspiracy theorist in his view.
It took another two weeks before I had the bin full of mineral water bottles by the door again, ready for me to take to the machine. I was salivating every time I walked past it.
I kept adding more bottles until the bin was overflowing and I had to put them all into a massive clear plastic sack that some building materials had come in. You can tell this isn’t going to end well, I’m sure…
One day, the builder boyfriend went down to the village for a few essentials. And when he came back with a shopping bag containing milk, cornflakes, chocolate, he patted his pockets and said: ‘Oh, I got you a five euro token for all those bottles. Now where is it?’ And he went on patting pockets, then turning out pockets. And token came there none.
‘What the hell!’ I screamed. ‘You took my bottles!’ There followed the most dreadful scene. It was possibly the worst argument we have had in nearly 15 years together.
Five euros was the most I had ever saved up. And he had lost the ticket. And I hadn’t even had the pleasure of feeding the bottles into the cruncher.
I screamed, I insulted him, I blamed him for everything, way beyond plastic bottles. If we hadn’t been unmarried, I think we would have got divorced over it, and he’s still barely speaking to me. So Leo Varadkar can get the blame for that as well.
Comments