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South Australia's container deposit:
no longer worth the bother

Written 2007/08/05, modified 2010/04/21
Contact: email daveclarkecb@yahoo.com
Also see The Failings of SA Governments


South Australia's container deposit, 5¢ at the time, was legislated by the Dunstan government in 1975. Inflation devalued 5¢ to the point where, if you placed any realistic value on your time, it was no longer worth returning containers for the deposit.

Container deposit graph The graph at the right shows the historical value of 5¢ from 1969 to 2007 according to data from the Reserve Bank of Australia. This graph shows that when the mandatory deposit was introduced in 1975, 5¢ bought the same as 35¢ buys in 2007. Puting it the other way, the 5¢ you got for a can in 2007 has less buying power than 1¢ had in 1975.

The Dunstan government of 1975 had the statesmanship to create a deposit that was large enough to make sure that most containers were recycled. No government since that time has been willing to return the value of the container deposit to what it was in 1975.

In 2008 the Rann government increased the container deposit to 10¢, improving the situation slightly; but this was just a bit of catch-up, it didn't bring the deposit back to what it should be. As can be seen on the graph, 10¢ now has the buying power of 2¢ in 1975.

 

How worth-while is picking up containers?

In 2010 most Australians would think that $100 a day is a small reward for a day's work. To get $100 at 10¢ per container you need to pick up 1000 containers. If you spend eight hours at it, that requires you to find and pick up two containers every minute; pretty steady work. This does not consider the cost of running a car to collect the containers and take them to the recycling depot.
Some people still collect containers for the deposit, because they don't have any other way of producing a little bit of income; many collect used containers because they believe it is the right thing to do; but no-one who valued their time would bother to collect containers purely for the money that they would get out of it.

It is well passed time for a substantial increase in the container deposit. It should be increased to at least 25¢, even better to 50¢; unfortunately it seems that no recent government has had the guts to stand up to the beverage manufacturers and do it.



Notes

My information on the history of the SA container deposit was from HotKey, the full URL is "http://www.hotkey.net.au/~gargoyle/CDL/AroundTheWorld/Australia/ SA/GeneralInformation.html"; there should be no spaces in the URL).

The full URL for the data used to produce the above graph is "http://www.rba.gov.au/Statistics/Bulletin/G01hist.xls".