ANY Irn Bru bottles lurking in your kitchen? Maybe a wee American cream soda bottle hidden in the garage or some red cola up in the attic?
Then best get them to the shops pronto. At midnight tonight shopkeepers the length and breadth of Scotland will no longer dish out cash to customers returning their empty Barr’s soft drink glass bottles.
Announced way back in August, Barr said they were scrapping the scheme after customers simply stopped returning bottles.
The glass cheque has been an integral part of Scottish childhood since 1905, when Barr’s started offering half a penny to customers returning their bottles. For generations of kids finding an empty Irn Bru bottle sitting in someone’s bin, or thrown away in a midden, has been an afternoon well spent.
Jonathan Kemp, Barr’s commercial director, said an increase in customers using council recycling and the cost of having to wash the bottles meant it was “uneconomic” to continue the practice.
“With improved kerbside recycling, only one in two of our bottles are being returned,” he said, “meaning that the process of handling returned bottles has become uneconomic.”
Outside the Londis on Glasgow’s Cathcart Road, Allison MacKenzie was returning two bottles of Barr’s lemonade while she still had time.
The 34-year-old said the glass cheque had been an integral part of her youth: “In my early 20s, my three flatmates and I would buy Barr’s glass bottles over the plastic ones specifically because we knew we could return them and use them to fund our next party.
“We’d end up lugging Ikea bags full of them to the local 24-hour garage to swap for supplies – crisps, ice, mixers, a 10-deck of Lambert and Butler. The staff always laughed at us – often in our faces – but it was worth it.”
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