As Return and Earn approaches its first birthday, the latest figures show that almost 50 million cans and plastic bottles have been put through reverse vending machines (RVMs) across the Central West and Orana regions alone.

That’s $5 million that has been returned to community groups and industrious collectors – a nice sum in anyone’s language.

The people of Bathurst have been among the most entrepreneurial, accounting for about 20 per cent of the returns across the western region.

Bathurst’s four RVMs have collected more than 950,000 returns, putting almost $1 million back into collectors’ pockets.

At last the scheme is generating the sort of good news the NSW Government would have been expecting when it was first announced.

A similar scheme had been running in South Australia for decades and it was quite embarrassing for the state that considers itself the nation’s leader to have been so far behind the eight-ball.

And when the government finally announced Return and Earn as an incentive for people to think more carefully about recycling – and as a reward to them for getting it right – they must have pictured happy shots of young kids collecting pocket money and local community groups benefiting from the generosity of others.

It didn’t quite pan out that way, though.

First, Bathurst didn’t have a reverse vending machine at all when the December 1 launch date arrived.

Then, when we did get a machine – at the Metro service station in South Bathurst - it drew complaints from neighbours about the noise, the rubbish left behind and the smell, before eventually being removed.

In other parts of the state, those who had been collecting containers for months in the lead-up to the scheme were unhappy to find that some of those containers – the bottles and cans that were crushed or badly misshapen – were not eligible for a refund.

Others, meanwhile, wanted more options to cash in their refund voucher from the machines.

Through it all, though, the government maintained a brave face, saying it would all be OK in the end. And now, maybe, it is.

Ten million returned bottles and cans in the Bathurst region alone can’t be wrong.