Bottle Recycling Depot
Wellington Rotary's Unique Recycling Facility for Fundraising
For four hours on Wednesdays and Saturdays Wellington Rotary members operate a bottle return depot for Wellington and the Prince Edward County area on behalf of The Beer Store and LCBO.
For returning their bottles and packaging, the public receives the same refund for their returns received in other outlets across the province. The Rotary Club receives a payment, based on volume of bottles and cans collected and returned, directly from The Beer Store organization. The Beer Store has indicated that the Wellington depot is one of the highest volume independent depots in the province. The result is that this operation is the top fundraising activity for Wellington Rotary. The Wellington facility is located in an old mill in the centre of Wellington.
The Beer Store organization is owned by the three largest breweries in Ontario. Its retail stores are found throughout Ontario and they retail other brands as well as their own. Bottles from any brewery, large or small, domestic or foreign, qualify for the regular rebate. The breweries are proud of their 95% recycling rate on beer bottles, and beer bottles are reused 12 to 15 times by them.
In addition to beer bottles, since 2007 The Beer Store entered an agreement with the Ontario government to take back and refund deposits on all wine, spirit and cooler containers sold in Ontario. At Wellington beer bottle returns are placed on different pallets depending on the size of the beer case – six, twelve, eighteen, twenty-four and twenty-eight and also colours are separated, brown, green or clear. A pallet of 24's takes eighty-four cases. When complete the pallet is wrapped in plastic. Wine and spirit bottles are collected in seven different containers depending on whether they are glass or plastic, large or small, and colour of glass.
Each Monday The Beer Store truck arrives and is loaded with the previous week's collection and often this completely fills the truck.