Groundhog Bottle and Can Deposit

Thursday, February 2, 2017  

     This overcast Groundhog Day, no overcast groundhog fled from its shadow hereabouts, which means that winter is over. 
     Today, I did not flee from 1066 pop and beer cans and bottles, as William the Conqueror did not flee from King Harold's army inEngland in 1066 A.D..  Instead, yesterday, our car hauled several bags containing 706 containers from Anaham to Williams Lake, where I sold the containers this morning to the local bottle depot for $41.99.  Today, helpful in-laws brought in the 360 containers that did not fit in the car yesterday, and I sold them for $23.42; the containers, not the in-laws.
     Pop cans, bottles, and tetra packs 1L or less pay $0.05, bigger than 1L pay $0.20, and beer cans and bottles pay $0.07; hence the uneven dollar totals.  Canada has had no penny, no $0.01 coin for a few years, the action of a centsless government, so the $41.99 rounds to $42.00.  Think of the 2 1/5 and 3s 10d of English money before decimalization there.
     Think of the day, decades ago, when a boyhood friend and I found in the neighborhood dump, washed, and brought to the bottle depot about 200 pop bottles, for $0.02 each, mere weeks before the bounty rose to $0.05.  The gopher bounty was $0.05 then, I recall from counting gopher tails before selling them to my uncle, who sold them to the provincial agriculture department. 
     Timing is everything in gleaning, as I know whenever I go to the local Salvation Army Thrift Shop's free food table and luck into bell peppers, tomatoes, or other earthly bounty from that other-worldly place.
     The Salvation Army's world headquarters is in London, England.  Last year I saw the church's impressive office building there. 
     William the Conqueror might have cleaned up after himself when he invaded, but the "green and pleasant land" I found in England was rotten with discarded drink containers.  The English pay no deposit, nor get none back for empties, which litter streets and parks.
     By contrast, Neugraben, a Hamburg suburb I spent August, 2016 in, courtesy of my generous sister, had a container-eating machine in a grocery store.  Feed it your empty, and it give you 0.25 Euros. 
     Perhaps discarded drink containers impeded German efforts to overrun England during World War Two.  Could a drink-container wall along the Canada-United States border keep the peace between these two countries?  Ask your local groundhog.