Charlie started work at Murray Breweries in Beechworth three days before World War I ended when the school-leaving age was 13. I mention this because it was World Clean-up Day on Sunday.
I joined Murray Breweries on a school-holiday job in 1968. Then it had ceased to be a brewery and was, and still is a soft-drink factory. Charlie had only a couple of years to go until retirement. He had worked there for 50 years. He was, indeed, part of the machinery. Charlie stood at a circular machine putting empty bottles in one end with his right hand. They went around being filled by cordial, water and then gas and he took them out with his left hand.
My job was at the other end of the factory. We worked from 6am till 6pm with half an hour for lunch for $27.50 a week. Me and another bloke who had left school for the job sorted used bottles: screw tops, crown tops, labels, ceramic-embossed, large medium and small, putting each into separate reusable wooden crates hour after hour.
The pace was frenetic. The truck that took the full bottles out, brought the empties back. We unloaded and sorted 11 and a half hours a day and complained about the lack of variety.
“”Young people today,” he said. “”I don’t know. I was nine years sorting bottles before I went on to the machines.”
The bottles went on to the washer upside down in rows of four and moved into an enclosed tanks where jets of water squirted into them and came round to where they were loaded. Any that weren’t clean just went around again.
We hardly used any new bottles. The peak demand for soft drink in Beechworth, as elsewhere, came with the summer school holidays. And that was the very time the kids were out scavenging for bottles to earn money from the deposits that adults cold not be bothered with.
Kids with old prams and billy carts scoured the town. Empty Murray Brewery bottles did not last long on the ground. There was no need for Do the Right Thing campaigns, or massive recycling “”education campaigns”, the 5-cent deposit did the trick. I estimate that at current prices 5 cents would be about 60 cents now _ a lot of money for kids aged six to, say, 14.
It was good for Murray Breweries, too. It had an army of kids supplying its bottles for nothing. The only people it penalised were the lazy people who dumped bottles without getting their deposits back.
For Murray Brewery workers the only perk of the job was you could drink as much soft drink as you liked. I was sick of it in a week.
One Saturday afternoon, though, I saw Red, one of the Murray Brewery workers, in the milk bar. He was drinking lemonade. Not Murray Breweries lemonade, but a brand called Leed, in a green bottle.
“”Why are you paying to drink that, when you can drink as much as you like free at work?” I asked.
“It’s new; I’m just trying it. And it’s 4 cents cheaper.”
At that he swigged the last of it and put the bottle back on the counter and the shop assistant took it away.
“”Well, gizme me deposit then,” Red demanded.
“”Well, there isn’t one on them new bottles, smartie,” she said.
“”Geez, I’ve been robbed,” Red said.
And haven’t we all.
The multi-national soft-drink companies much prefer no-deposit containers. When the multi-nationals lowered the nominal price of their drinks by abandoning the voluntary deposit system, the local companies had to follow.
In doing so they lost the advantage of having an army of kids getting the bottles back. They also lost out because the big players could get new bottles cheaper because they had larger-scale production.
It mattered not to the big players that the community as a whole bore the cost of waste disposal; that soft-drink trucks ran empty back to the factory instead of loaded with empties. The multi-nationals cynically helped fund anti-litter campaigns and inefficient, piecemeal kerbside recycling collections in the hope of stalling compulsory deposits.
Unlike many small drink makers, Murray Breweries is still Australian-owned, but it long ago abandoned deposits..
We should bring them back compulsorily at 60 cents a bottle (including plastic ones). There is nothing like the entrepreneurial power of a bunch of mercenary kids to clean up the bottles, reduce landfill and use resources more efficiently.