Hands off my empty plastic bottles!

‘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.