SINGAPORE: Every few weeks, 79-year-old Tan Mui Sng heads to the reverse vending machine at the void deck of her Serangoon housing block with a trolley and bags of empty containers in tow.
The retiree returns dozens of containers each time, earning a few dollars in deposits — the result of hours spent scouring her neighbourhood for discarded drink cans and bottles.
While already a habitual collector before the nationwide Beverage Container Return Scheme (BCRS) was launched on Apr 1, the prospect of higher returns from reverse vending machines has spurred Mdm Tan to collect even more.
The scheme, which is still in a transition period until Thursday (Oct 1), may not have altered her desire to recycle discarded cans and bottles, but it has certainly made her weekly efforts more profitable.
“For this one, there’s much more money,” she said in Mandarin, adding that she used to earn S$0.50 (US$0.39) for every 1kg of containers she sold to the rag-and-bone man.
She has lost track of how often she has used the reverse vending machine, but estimated earning more than S$10 from returning containers.
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