On paper that doesn’t sound too good.

While the scheme’s arrival in Orange was met with enthusiasm and excitement things haven’t panned out as well as we would have hoped.

In fact, the Orange Return and Earn deposit points have had more than their share of teething problems.

For a start there’s been plenty of complaints about the amount of time it takes to deposit items and the long lines of people patiently waiting their turn.

There’s also been plenty of talk about the fact that the machine is often out of use, prompting people to dump rubbish around the area.

One of the most common complaints is that the locations of Orange’s two deposit devices are inappropriate and hard to get to.

It’s disappointing such a fantastic initiative has fallen so flat in Orange when the latest figures show that almost 50 million cans and plastic bottles have been put through reverse vending machines across the Central West and Orana regions alone.

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Orange’s two RVM – located at the north Orange shopping centre and outside Flip Out in Edward Street – are responsible for accepting 6,398,147 items.

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

Slowly the scheme is starting to generate the sort of good news the NSW government would have been expecting when it was first announced.

If fact 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 turn out that way, though.

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 this region alone means we’re heading in the right direction.