The return of the bottle pickers

April 9th, 2008

Water in the basement, sand and slime on the lawn, and dog droppings on the sole of your shoe. The return of spring means the return of many wonderful things. It also means the return of the bottle pickers.

I was out for a drive on the weekend and, in three different ditches in three different counties, spotted people searching for returnable bottles. For my money, the bottle picker is as welcome a sign of spring as green grass and a robin’s red breast. Bottle picking is recycling at its best, and it is comforting to see the process in action. As long as a bottle is worth something, there will be someone willing to step up and claim the reward.

These fine, ambitious folks are called scavengers, and they deserve our thanks for making the ditch a cleaner place. The person who throws a bottle into a ditch, ignoring the few cents it is worth, thinks they are making the world a better place by providing income for someone else. These fine, frivolous folks are called litterbugs, and deserve more than thanks. They deserve a job walking in a landfill separating dirty diapers from rotten potatoes. I wouldn’t mind seeing even more bottle pickers. Scavengers get a bad rap from time to time, but what keeps this planet healthy is that, sooner or later, something always shows up to clean up someone else’s mess. Imagine the state we would be in if it stopped happening.

My brothers and I did a lot of bottle picking when we were young. You might say it was our first job. We would bike into town, collecting bottles along the way, and spend whatever we collected on junk food like Bottle Caps, Fun Dip and Sweet Tarts. On a good day in the spring, we could make enough to buy chocolate bars and a can of pop. The best day was the one where I found a dirty magazine in the ditch. Melting snow caused the colour to run on a few pages, but you could still see some of the things the other kids were only dreaming about. I hid that magazine under a rock, and went back to check on it every day for a month, to make sure it hadn’t corrupted any other impressionable young minds. I never got any credit for that.

People throw away perfectly good stuff all the time, and any bottle picker worth his ditch will tell you that. While we are at it, we should bring back the garbage pickers too. Perhaps the most effective recycling program there is, garbage picking is generally frowned upon, discouraged, or flat out illegal; which is nonsense. Anyone who can help reduce the amount of garbage in a landfill should be applauded, not apprehended. Years ago, the man who ran our township dump had only one leg. It wasn’t a job you would find on everyone’s top ten careers list, but I never heard him complain.

It seemed to suit him, until they told him he couldn’t bring the dump home anymore. I would hate to be the politician calling the shots if a perfectly good wooden leg came in, and the dump guy wasn’t allowed to take it for a run. Seeing bottle pickers this spring means that recycling is working. We owe it to ourselves to clean up our act a bit, and a step into the ditch is a step in the right direction.