Waste collector Anne de Bruin from De Weere is very happy that from today a 15 cent deposit will be levied on cans. Since there is a deposit on small bottles, she encounters them a lot less when she cycles her round.
“It seems like I’m dreaming,” says Anne enthusiastically about the new deposit. “It has been promised for so long. It is not an April Fool’s joke either. I am very happy with it.” NH Radio reporter Samanta de Groot takes a look at Anne in De Weere.
On her electric bicycle with a cart behind it, Anne cleans up litter. Along the way she encounters many cans. “Last Monday I found 177 cans on a piece of land,” she says. “It’s a real drama with those things.” She is sure that she will soon encounter fewer cans.
Since the introduction of deposits on plastic bottles, she encounters them a lot less. “I now do parts of no man’s land, I still find very old bottles there, but on my regular route, of 18 kilometers by bike, I hardly find any old bottles anymore.” On that route, Anne sometimes finds about 4 or 5 bottles with a deposit. “I used to have 30 a week.”
Misuse
Anne has equipped a special litter bike with a trolley for the necessities for the road. “I have a landing net, a grapple and another telescopic pole. They are all in my cart.” In the beginning, Anne sometimes sat on the bicycle with the grab in her hand. “That didn’t always go well,” she says with a laugh.
As a litter picker you can also encounter beautiful things. “I found a new bike in the water,” says Anne. It is her most remarkable find. When she looked up the bike on the internet, it turned out to be 900 euros. “I reported it and kept it for a year and now my granddaughter is riding it.”
Anne also sometimes comes across things that don’t fit in a garbage bag and then makes new things out of them. For example, Samanta sees a beast made of hubcaps. “I keep big things,” Anne explains about the origin of her creations. “Then at some point I have a pile lying around and then suddenly I think ‘Oh, I can make that out of it!’.”