Bottles along the road

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33649, 26 September 1974, Page 16

Bottles along the road

How many empty beet bottles are there lying in the grass alongside State Highway 1 between North Cape and Bluff? Members of North Canterbury Federated Farmers think about 300,000 — and they ’want them all removed, with ’other rubbish which passing motorists throw from their vehicles. The farmers say it is no fun having a grass-mower blade tangling with empty beer bottles. The results are dangerous. A delegate at yesterday’s meeting in Christchurch of the provincial executive of North Canterbury Federated , Farmers said he had recently

cut the verges of his property along the highway. He had taken the trouble to gather up the bottles first — and collected 150 over a distance of a mile. At that rate, he said, there; would be 300,000 empties lying alongside the main .highway for the length of ’New Zealand. The Dunsandel branch of ’Federated Farmers wanted ’the returnable value of beer bottles to be increased to the same amount as soft-drink bottles to encourage their return to the breweries. Another delegate said he doubted whether increasing .the value of the bottles ’would make any difference. He. too, had found plenty of ,i bottles outside his property, and also half-gallon jars. ! ’lt

appears to me that the people who do this have too much money in their pockets anyway,” he said. A third delegate said that if the price of the empties went too high the breweries would not be interested in taking them back because they could buy new ones for less. A fourth delegate said that scouts and similar groups had lost interest in beer bottles because it was no longer econmic to collect them. The only thing that had “saved” bottle drives was the recent increase in the vaiue of soft-drink bottles. The farmers will ask their Dominion council to raise the matter with the breweries.