A Brownsville man has become the victim of a recycling bin raider.
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Adrian moved into a block of units in Prince Edward Drive in December – the same time the Return and Earn scheme was launched.
Designed to reduce litter, the scheme offers people a 10-cent refund – via a reverse vending machine – for any approved bottles and cans.
Since then, Adrian’s elderly neighbour upstairs has been regularly rummaging through each tenant’s recycling bin.
READ MORE: Who gets the money in your recycling bin?
“He’s taking it from where the bins are stored,” Adrian said.
“He then drags then up the side and empties them all out and is ratting through them whenever he thinks no-one will see him.”
While Adrian said the bin raider stores some of his finds in the back seat of his car, the rest of it he takes to his own unit – which is directly above Adrian’s – at all hours of the night.
“He’s carting his bottles and cans upstairs,” Adrian said.
“I don’t know what he’s doing with them up there – maybe counting them – but we can hear him putting them on the ground.
“You could tell he was trying to be quiet about it, you can tell he knows he’s doing the wrong thing.
“It peaked the other night when he kept on doing it until midnight. We were trying to go to sleep and we could just hear the constant noise of him putting bottles on the ground.
“The next morning I heard him come down the stairs and he rattled all the bottles as he came down at 5am. That’s when I came out and gave him a serve.”
As well as the noise, Adrian is concerned that the scheme was designed to reduce litter, not take items already destined to be recycled.
He also views it a breach of privacy.
“I might not like him going through my recycling bin where I might have put paperwork by accident, or something with my name on it,” he said.
As well as lodging a complaint with the real estate agent, Adrian has also fought back by crushing his cans and removing labels off his bottles – which make them ineligible for the Return and Earn scheme.
A Wollongong City Council spokesman said residents own the contents of their bins while they are on their property.
Once at the kerbside it becomes the property of the council.