A man started recycling cans and bottles without knowing that it would help him buy his future house. At first he only did it as a hobby, but after 7 years collecting containers he obtained a sum of 46,000 dollars (just over 38,000 euros), which was enough to participate in an auction and buy a house, the entrance fee for which he was able to pay with that money. As for why he had so many bottles to get such a sum of money, he only remembers that “it just added up.”
Damian Gordon, 36, managed to collect no less than 450,000 cans and bottles, all through the New South Wales ‘Return and Earn’ container deposit programme. Thanks to this program, for each bottle or can recycled in a ‘Return and Profits’ deposit, they were given 10 cents (approximately 5 euro cents), as stated in an interview with the Australian media. ABC News.
With all the money made since he started collecting containers back in 2017, it was enough for Gordon to put down the down payment on a two-bedroom house on the central coast of New South Wales. Of course, no one expects to get so much money from trash. He was not aware that he had collected the amount of that deposit since he did not see the money that was in the account destined for the refunds he received for recycling.
“The most important thing was that I had a bank account, where I couldn’t see (what I had),” he admits.
He bought a house thanks to recycling 450,000 cans
When he got the money, he started looking for a house. “I was very lucky, I bought a house on the Central Coast, at auction,” he said. “It’s a small, two-room old fishing hut, but I’m lucky to have a roof over my head,” he says.
Gordon estimates that since 2017, he has delivered about 450,000 cans and bottles through the Return and Earn packaging return program. Although he has a regular job during the week, he also volunteers at music festivals, where he collects thousands of containers at a time. “I wanted to get involved in the culture of music festivals and that’s what drove me,” he said. “I’ve met a lot of famous people just cleaning upstage, like The Presets and Sneaky Sound System. “You can see a different side of them in the back of the house and in the green room.”
Against the “throwaway society”
He explained that he did not only collect cans, since many attendees abandoned objects such as camping equipment, decorative lights or cowboy hats. “I once brought home a ton of food: weeks and weeks’ worth of non-perishable food,” he said. “There is so much waste in society, we live in a throwaway society. Some of these events, like weddings and music festivals, produce a lot of waste,” explains Gordon.
Danielle Smalley, executive director of Exchange for Change (the organization responsible for ‘Return and Earn’), assured that the total reimbursed to Gordon is the highest they are aware of. “It’s stories like that that make me jump out of bed every day to go to work,” he said.
“What it shows is that while there are environmental benefits, there is also a really fantastic economic and social benefit.”
Mr Gordon attributes his commitment to recycling to his childhood. “The real beginning was going to the convenience store with my mother when I was little to buy my school shoes and then finding the odd piece of gold in a council van over the years,” he said. “I have furnished half of my house with objects collected by the town hall, but I am very meticulous with the cleaning beforehand.”
Now that he has to pay the mortgage, the new owner has no intention of stopping collecting cans and bottles anytime soon. “It’s part of my nature now, I can’t stop: recycling and caring for the environment is part of who I am.