'All hail the Re-Turn dirty protester - he shat in that bottle for all of us'
Modern-day hero was so exasperated he left a turd in a bottle and put it in an RVM. It's a sign we need to shut down the whole stupid scheme.
We all knew Re-Turn was a total sh*tshow. But now it’s official, after the greatest protest act known to man.
The year 2024 redeemed itself in its final hours last week, when the Irish Mirror revealed how one customer got so frustrated by this stupid scheme, he defecated into a bottle and put it into a reverse vending machine. It was an act of civil disobedience up there with the tank man of Tiananmen square, the sacrifices of the suffragettes or the fella who drove a car into RTE.
This was an old-school Irish dirty protest by a white knight - a s**te knight? - standing against the oppressive force of nonsense green policies driving us demented. The identity of this modern-day hero is a mystery, but he let us into the workings of his mind by following up with a letter to the Minister responsible, Ossian Smyth.
It was like reading the Unambomber’s manifesto - mad, but hard to disagree with.
READ MORE: Man defecates in bottle and inserts it in Re-turn machine in dirty protest over controversial scheme
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He wrote how he “lodged a complaint about the ridiculous deposit return scheme by putting one of my own deposits in a reverse vending machine. "I put a large turd in a bottle and inserted it into the machine and listened as it squelched inside.”
He said the scheme had: “enslaved citizens to haul stinking bottles and cans back to vending machines” and questioned the environmental merit of it, with all the unnecessary effort of it causing even more pollution. He finished: “I realise you can’t undo this mess, anymore than I can unsh**t the turd in the bottle. I just hope your successor will move to unwind Re-Turn.”
So now we can also understand the Re-Turn turd as a genius artistic metaphor, as well as an attention-demanding protest of the ages.
Solidarity with the Re-Turn phantom sh**ter. Feel welcome to step out of the shadows and reveal your identity, whoever you are. I should assure readers it was not, in fact, me - despite some wondering if I was behind it. In fairness, our anonymous friend did raise a lot of the points I’ve been banging on about. I wonder does he also get into dinner party arguments about it? People at dinner parties are the only ones who support Re-Turn, as far as I can see.
I thought of him at the weekend when I lost my Re-Turn voucher. I’d collected up all the bottles and cans from over Christmas and lugged the whole kit and kaboodle to the RVM, which actually worked for once and didn’t break down mid-process.
It added up to a tenner, and then the voucher fell out of my jacket pocket, lost forever. Picture me on my knees on the ground, screaming at the sky: “Nooooooo” with the rain coming down. Well not quite, but if anything would make you want to s**t into a bottle and put it into an RVM, it’s that.
Not only another free tenner in the coffers of a state-organised scheme that refuses to be transparent on its profits, but I’d also given them my Re-Turnables as well.
This is a scheme that claims green credentials, but where’s the cost benefit analysis on that? Can we see data on how it has increased recycling rates enough to be worth the fleet of trucks on the road, the massive machines in every shop? If there’s no cost benefit analysis, then one must be done. If it shows it’s not worth it, we must pull the plug.
Accept it didn’t work out, cut our losses and move on. Just get rid of it, pretend it never happened, like we did with the referendums and the hate speech bill.
Imagine what life would be like. Back to those halcyon, pre-Re-Turn days when our lives weren’t reduced to driving bottles and cans back and forth to SuperValu in the name of EU climate targets. We could just put them in the green bin, like we were already doing anyway. We could Make Recycling Great Again.
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