Date: 6 March 2003
Recent changes in regulations have already helped reduce litter, with many drink cartons now being recycled instead of being sent to the dump.
Glass wine, sauce, oil and preserve bottles do not yet carry refundable deposits and can be sold only as scrap glass. Whole bottles fetch a price of less than $5 per tonne at the nearest depot, which does not even pay for the cost of transport, so the group has been reluctant to accept them.
When they learned glass containers, which had been sorted by colour and then crushed, could earn $25 per tonne, Mal Pomeroy and John Francis built a portable, electrically-operated bottle crusher and successfully tested it, producing two 200-litre bins of green glass scrap, weighing about 500 kilograms, which will shortly be delivered to the depot.
This will greatly reduce the amount of glass being dumped from Port Vincent, and will help to fund Tidy Towns volunteers' projects.
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