It’s official people. Satire is dead. It has been killed by Reporting Scotland, who in their efforts to out SNPbad the SNPbaddest of the print media are now reporting old episodes of Seinfeld as news. The story concerned the Scottish Government’s proposed scheme to charge a deposit of 20p on plastic and glass bottles and drinks cans which would be refundable when the drink container was returned to a recycling depot. The idea is to reduce the amount of plastic, class, and aluminium which isn’t recycled.
It’s a good idea which works very well in other places. In the US state of Connecticut there’s a 5 cent deposit on bottles and cans. There are bottle and can return machines in major supermarkets and malls. You never see any cans or bottles lying around as rubbish in the street because people collect them in order to return them and collect the deposit. A number of places in Europe have a similar scheme. Everywhere which has introduced it has found that it works well and is a good way of ensuring that less waste which could be recycled ends up in landfill. A recent study of a bottle and can deposit scheme in the American state of Oregon found that it was successful in obtaining a return rate of over 90% of all the cans and bottles sold in the state. It’s a good idea, and everywhere it has been introduced it has been successful.
Despite that, it couldn’t possibly work in Scotland. This country can’t have nice things. And we most certainly can’t have any nice things if that thing has been proposed by Thatessempee. We were solemnly told in this evening’s edition that the Scottish Government’s proposed bottle deposit scheme was going to run into severe difficulties because crooks would fill up lorries with bottle and cans and import them from England in order to make a quick profit. When I was a wean there was a 10p deposit on Barrs Irn Bru bottles. We used to call them gless cheques. But I don’t recall any gless cheque ginger bottle mafia raking in millions. Perhaps my memory is just faulty because someone mugged me for an empty bottle of cream soda and I am suffering from post traumatic scoosh syndrome.
This all sounds very familiar to the warnings prior to the introduction of the minimum price scheme for alcohol that people would be organising booze trips in order to stock up with bevvy in Carlisle and Newcastle. That didn’t happen either.
Yes. This was an actual news story. BBC Scotland actually decided to take up some of your time and warn you about the risks of people raking in a massive profit from a proven scheme to recycle bottles and cans. The Tories are being funded by dark Russian money, conspiring with the Brexit party to take remain voting Scotland out of the EU against its will and telling us that it doesn’t matter how we vote we won’t be allowed to have another independence referendum under any circumstances. Scottish democracy itself is being trashed. But never mind that, ran the thinking in Pacific Quay’s news editorial team, some guy with a vested interest is making entirely spurious claims about putting a deposit on ginger bottles. Let’s run with that instead.
Never mind the drug trade, Scotland will be plagued by gangs running plastic bottles and drink cans. Bru is the new cocaine. Innocent passers by in Govan will be drive by casualities of Don Canleone of the recycling mafia taking out the Russian Plastikbottlov gang in order to steal their stash of empty bottles of Fanta. Pensioners in Berwick and Carlisle will be the hapless victims of Scottish thugs mugging them for their bottles of dandelion and burdock. But that’s if they can get there, as muggers and booze trippers heading south are likely to collide with all the lorries packed full of bottles and cans heading north and there will be traffic chaos on the A1. Did the SNP not think this through!
Tomorrow we can expect to see an earnest report from Scotland in Union telling us that the trade will be worth billions annually because in an independent Scotland we’ll be using bru bottles as currency. Still at least that ought to put their interminable banging on about what currency are you going to use eh eh? to bed. Oh woe! Oh Scotland! You can’t ever have any nice ideas. We’re the only country on the planet that’s incapable of having money or even gless cheques.
What Reporting Scotland didn’t tell you was that this idea was the basis of an episode of the US sitcom Seinfeld in 1996. In the two part episode The Bottle Deposit, the 21st and 22nd episodes of season seven of the popular comedy show, the character Newman learns that there’s a 10 cent deposit on bottles and cans in the state of Michigan, as opposed to the 5 cent deposit in New York, and becomes obsessed with finding a way to load up a truck full of bottles and cans to take to Michigan in order to profit from that state’s deposit scheme. Naturally all Newman’s scheming comes to naught. But who needs episodes of Seinfeld when we have Reporting Scotland, killing satire for us every evening in our living rooms.
Nowhere else where a drinks container deposit scheme has been introduced has suffered serious issues with Don Canleone and the Bru Bottle mafia. What also didn’t happen was any serious attempt on Reporting Scotland to rebut the story as the pile of steaming unrecycled crap that it is. But hey, we’re in an election and the priority is to make sure that Scotland doesn’t fall prey to those vile separatists with their dangerous notions of ridding the land of plastic waste. Can we please put a 20p deposit on the Tories and whoever it is who decides on what is going to be the news agenda on BBC Scotland? There’s a lot of us who would like to return them as well.
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