Empty bottles sought

Press, 5 March 1982, Page 4

Empty bottles sought

The Christchurch City Council will conduct an experiment to determine whether enough empty spirits, wine and soft-drink bottles. can be collected in Christchurch to make it worth while for them to be sent by railway back to Auckland for sale.

Bottles that have no local resale value are usually smashed and sold as cullet. Cr G. D. Stanley, the chairman of the council’s re-source-recovery committee, said yesterday that he had been approached, by a freight consolidator who had brought full bottles south about the possibility of getting the empty bottles back to the South Auckland Bottling Company. A list that Cr Stanley is now preparing for circulation round Christchurch names 83 varieties of bottle that could be sold in Auckland.

Cr Stanley said that some volunteer collection groups in the city were already asking for a copy of the list. For the next few weeks the listed varieties of bottles will be kept in a separate area at the Bexley tip’s

recycling depot to see whether enough can be collected to make it worthwhile to pack and send the bottles to the North Island. Cr Stanley said that the new tip face at Bexley would open on Saturday on the side of Breezes Road where the recycling centre was sited. As an experiment traffic would be directed through the centre’s unloading area to see if tip users could be encouraged to leave recyclable material behind before proceeding to the tip face. The separation of recyclable material would not be compulsory, but the tip’s users would be asked if they had anything to contribute when their vehicles were stopped for payment of the tipping fee. Reductions in the fee are available for part-loads of rubbish that can be recycled.