Local container depots honoured by campaign

By Justin Seward - Lethbridge Herald on December 11, 2024.

The Alberta Bottle Depot Association has been running the Applaud a Depot campaign since 2015 and Lethbridge’s GPS Container Depots were recognized through the campaign on Saturday.
The campaign is about bringing awareness to what depots do in their communities.
Between both GPS Container Depot location, they raised $57,000 for the two local food banks and raising over $130,000 for 125 local organizations last year.
“Hats off to all the organizations out there that like to fund what they do with bottle drives and they feel that bottle drives is a very important way to fund their organizations,” said Brian Eakett, owner of both GPS Container Depots in Lethbridge.
An environmental impact includes when one aluminum can is recycled, it saves enough energy to run a television for four hours.
“Those are values that people don’t often recognize with what we’re contributing back in, in our depots,” said Ron Meeres, ABDA’s member experience specialist.
Meeres highlighted the efforts of local GPS staff.
“People look at a bottle depot and go yeah the guys are working here,” said Meeres.
There are five people that have been employed for over seven years with the local GPS depots.
“Each of those five people will have refunded a million dollars back into the community over the time they’ve been here,” said Meeres.
The local GPS processes 1.5 million containers each year.
“We’re just proud to be a part of all of it,” said Eakett.
“We really work hard to deal with all the bottle drives, all the sports teams, all the teams that are going on trips, all the band concerts.”
GPS prides itself on providing a great experience for customers.
“We just want to move people in and out as fast (as) we can and make it a very pleasant experience for them,” said Eakett.
“We don’t make them stand out in the cold for half an hour to bring bottles in because we have all of our tables going and we could move a lot of bottles in a big hurry.”
Another notable recyclable accomplishments from the Lethbridge GPS Depots included in 2023 diverting more than 800,000 kg of material through recycling beverage containers so that it could be used to produce new products from recovered materials and over 1.6 million kilograms of material was diverted from the landfill and was recycled into other products.

2
-1