Can recycling bin: Success
It’s been not quite three years since Victoria released their “container deposit scheme” (California viewers would recognize it as functionally equivalent to the CRV, only a good bit more generous to the consumer as it’s not completely captured by private interests yet). We end up with a few cans, and were keeping them in garbage bags in the garage, which we’d then transfer into the car, and feed into the machines which read each can, make sure it’s had a deposit, and then pay you for it.
This is a pain in the arse, to the point where it had crossed my mind to simply give the cans to someone else so I did not have to deal with them. But in speaking to the person cleaning the machines, they mentioned if you have a lot, there’s another place you can take them where the machine is automated - you just empty your bags onto a rack and the machine sorts them all for you. So the next time we had a car full of cans (some months later) we went to have a look, and yes, as advertised, it’s much easier.
We did still have the issue of bags full of cans in the garage, and the potential for drips in the car… but it crossed my mind: what if I just went to Bunnings and bought a wheely bin, and put it out with the other bins, and then dragged that to the redemption place when it was full? They can’t be that expensive I reasoned, and sure enough they were actually cheaper than I thought - A$139 for a 240L bin that’s fairly reasonable quality.
So we bought one, put the cans we had in it, and went “that’s very nice”. Until last weekend when we noticed it was starting to get a bit full - not desparately so, so we waited until this weekend.
I put the trailer on the car, pulled the bin up into the trailer (far easier than I thought, 240L of un-crushed aluminum cans weighs less than you’d think - the cans cannot be crushed so that the robot can read the QR code on each can), lashed it down and closed with some ratchet straps and off we went.
The place was hopping, so I had to wait a few minutes before it was my turn at the robot, but once it was, it was as advertised: lift the bin up onto the rack, up-end it, and walk out. 240L of uncrushed cans is about A$30 worth at 10c/can.
Hose out the bin when we got home and that’s that. Honestly the worst part of the whole thing is connecting the trailer (we put it around the back of the house, which means pulling it around several obstacles to attach it to the car), but I can mitigate that by scheduling things better to try coincide it with a tip run or something.
