Journeys in Space and Time - Don Armitage: Recycling bottles, been there done that

Leaving empty glass bottles for the milkman to collect is totally old-school to my generation. PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES

In 1954, my first teacher in primmer one was Una Platts (1908-2005).

Una was 46 at the time. Milk was delivered in the early morning right to our letterbox in pint or quart (600ml or 1200ml) glass bottles with aluminium seals. There was no telephoning overseas, so writing letters was how people kept in touch.

I recall almost everyone had a stamp collection. My father worked as a linotype mechanic at a newspaper.

Now, I've just heard on the radio of an 'initiative' gaining ground in New Zealand, similar to what Vancouver has been doing quite successfully for many years now, to charge a little bit more on many glass and plastic containers so that the purchaser could get it back by returning them to particular places.

To 'initiate' something seems like it might be happening for the first time but, in this case, it is certainly not so, as we baby boomers know so well.

Milkman wearing fluorescent yellow jacket, smiling and walking from his milk float with milk bottles in hand on urban street in morning light.

Those aluminium seals? Encouraged by our teachers about how valuable the activity was, all of us kids took them to school to accumulate sufficient weight to go off to the scrap metal dealers for extra school funds.

Those stamps? Again to swell school funds, we were encouraged to steam the stamps off envelopes, dry them and bring them to school. The school would sell the accumulated thousands of stamps to bulk stamp buyers, who would probably on-sell them to international buyers.

But the activity that most attracted myself and my brothers, purely out of greed, was collecting beer and fizzy drink bottles for the money we could earn. Nothing to do with school.

The beer bottles were mainly the large brown ones and the fizzy drink bottles were either the large or small Coke, Fanta, Lemon and Paeroa, etc — each having a particular refund price so we could keep a running tally of how rich we were getting.

Under those circumstances, we got very cunning to maximise our income. For instance, in those days a lot of people used to just toss their rubbish, bottles included, out the window as they drove along, so walking along the sides of roads collecting them was well worth it.

Knowing who were the big drinkers was also of benefit.

We used to go through the local rubbish dumps, not just for bottles but anything that looked of value — scrap metal, scrap leather so we could make leather straps just like the male teachers, often ex-World War II veterans, used to strap us at school.

And then of course there was looking for lost golf balls to sell back to golfers. We got into trouble at one stage for waiting in the rough for someone to tee off. Then one of us would run across the fairway stamping on the golfer's ball as he ran while a fellow conspirator kept an eye on where the ball was.

Once the golfer had gone absolutely crazy searching for his ball and then moved on, we retrieved the ball to sell at some later time.

And I mentioned my father and his job at the Auckland Star.

Well, at one time the electric motors used there were changed, as I seem to recall, but I could be wrong, from AC to DC or the other way round. Anyway, Dad brought home dozens of them that they were throwing out, and it was up to us brothers to extract the copper, brass and cast iron from them. We got very good at dismantling them and we made what to us was a fortune.

The milk bottles, once emptied, were washed and put out in the letter box along with tokens to await the full bottles the next morning. So they were all recycled, anyway. It kept up into my adult years.

Around 1980, for a short time I was a factory manager living in a small town.

Our milkman was only ever a noise to us. If one or both of us were awake in the pitch blackness of the predawn hours, there'd be the pleasant familiar but faint noise … clip clop clip clop clip … and then it would stop, and there'd be the sound of milk bottles clinking, followed by clip clop clip clop clip … and then once more it would stop.

It was repeated time and time again. I heard later the horse knew without being told when to stop and start just from the number of times it had done it. And fuelled by grass!
And Una Platts? She left teaching after that first year and wrote A Lively Capital — Auckland 1840-65 and Nineteenth Century Artists, became a painter, researcher and lecturer. She died in 2005, at the age of 97.

That's my recycled memories of recycling. I'm sure it would engage quite a few young people today, given the opportunity.