For years now, Jennifer Willis has been collecting refundable containers and sending the money to Tanzania.
At 10 cents each they add up, especially given she has a small army of collectors helping turn household waste into money that buys food for Maasai school children.
But the retired teacher has also spent years in a state of mild bewilderment over the rules that dictate what's covered by Queensland's container deposit scheme and what isn't.
Take milk, for example.
Flavoured milk containers are in but only if they hold less than a litre.
Plain, unflavoured milk containers are firmly out, regardless of size.
It's the same for containers that have held pure fruit or vegetable juice but you can get 10 cents for popper-style box drinks that contain fruit.
Then there's the minefield of alcoholic drinks.
Beer stubbies are an excellent earner for the Mealtime for Maasai Students project.
But wine bottles are out, even those that have held non-alcoholic wine. It's a no for glass spirit bottles too.
However alcopops and wine coolers, which are based on wine and spirits, are in. Go figure.
Other state and territory-run deposit schemes are broadly similar, with equally paradoxical rules that leave people like Ms Willis scratching their heads.
How did these strange rules come about and why are some containers locked out of deposit schemes amid the shift to a circular economy focused on reuse and minimising waste?
To understand that it's necessary to take a trip down memory lane says Vaughan Levitzke, who worked on South Australia's trailblazing scheme.
It began in 1977 and served as a template for all the schemes that have followed but it was, first and foremost, about litter reduction not resource recovery.
The beverage industry had started to churn out smaller, often single-serve drinks containers for a society that was increasingly on the move. The result was a tsunami of rubbish and angry voters demanding action.
"There were cans everywhere. There are some very old photos from round the 70s, places like Windy Point where people used to go and park and have a drink and they'd just chuck the cans out the window.
"There were piles and piles of cans, and same thing at football and cricket matches, and at the beach.
"So we had this consumer concern about litter and eventually the government put a five-cent deposit on soft drink and beer containers.
"But they left out wine because in the 70s people didn't drink a lot of wine, so it didn't appear in the litter stream. And they left out fruit juice because in those days it wasn't a thing. And it left out milk, which was considered a staple in the family home."
Of course the range of containers covered by the scheme has expanded since then and Mr Levitzke played a major role in that at South Australia's Environment Protection Authority in the early 2000s.
He says the beverage industry, which has to pay the deposits and the costs of running the scheme, has fought back at times.
"When we were planning the expansion, the push back from the beverage industry was pretty big, particularly for those that weren't encumbered with a deposit, people in the fruit juice industry and also the milk industry.
"We didn't put it on white milk, it was only on flavoured milk ... they said this was going to be a huge health problem. They said people will leave milk in the containers and it will go off, and it will stink and it will become a health hazard.
"There were all sorts of weird and wonderful reasons not to do it, from those that weren't part of the deposit scheme before, but we pushed through and got it done."
Mr Levitzke now chairs Circular360, which promotes the adoption of the circular economy principles, and says it's time for fresh look at all container deposit schemes.
But he says the focus must be on resource recovery and reuse, not on what does and doesn't appear in the litter stream.
Federal, state and territory environment ministers are meeting in Brisbane today to thrash out issues that transcend state and territory borders.
Gayle Sloan is the CEO of the peak body for the $15 billion waste and resource recovery industry and desperately hopes the container deposit scheme conundrum will get their attention.
It's topical because NSW has just flagged plans to include glass wine and spirit bottles and larger containers in its deposit scheme.
South Australia is considering doing the same as part of a review to modernise its scheme.
But latecomer Victoria appears to be heading in the opposite direction.
It's feared the state will exclude glass wine and spirit bottles when its scheme starts next year after recent kerbside collection changes targeting household glass.
Ms Sloan can't see the sense in excluding high-use containers like wine bottles from the deposit scheme especially "when we know a clean separated stream gives us the highest recovery rates".
Australian Council of Recycling CEO Suzanne Toumbourou agrees there is a pressing need to harmonise deposit schemes across Australia.
"It's unhelpful to have that kind of fragmentation. We think wine and spirit bottles in particular should be a component of container deposit schemes and we'd encourage all states to follow the lead of NSW.
"Not just because it makes a valuable contribution to glass recycling but also to remove the confusion for consumers."
For Ms Willis, she just wants to maximise the amount of money going to help feed school kids in Tanzania.
"They're still not collecting wine bottles, juice bottles or milk bottles. It's money that's basically going straight into the recycling bin."
