Thompson recycling centre ramping up sherry bottle program, as addictions struggles continue in city

It's cheap, it's got a high alcohol content and it's often the drink of choice for many struggling with addiction in Thompson.

Sherry bottles often littered the streets in such large numbers it's prompted a special recycling program that is now looking to expand.

Every year, tens of thousands of bottles of inexpensive apera, a variety of sherry, are sold in Thompson.

"You would see the bottles lying all over the streets, in the parks and basically anywhere you went. People would just drink them and then just throw them out onto the roads," Thompson Recycling Centre manager Cheryl Mulroney said. 

Mulroney said it became such a problem the city started a recycling program specifically for the bottles, the only city in the province with one. 

"Since the program started, we got about 370,000 sherry bottles collected," Mulroney said.

The Thompson Chamber of Commerce initially launched the program in 2001 to try to help clean up the city. It paid five cents for each empty bottle returned to hotel vendors, and in the first year paid out $1,500, enough for 30,000 bottles.

Sherry bottle collection in the city slowly dwindled over the past few years because the centre was not taking in bottles during the COVID-19 pandemic, Mulroney said. 

"In 2020, we had 13,800 sherry bottles dropped off," she said.

Manitoba Liquor & Lotteries (MBLL) provides $2,000 annually toward the bottle return program, which now pays out 10 cents each for the bottles, which are accepted in bags of 100.

With thousands of bottles still being sold and discarded every year, Mulroney hopes to expand the program in the coming months.

She's working with a couple of the vendors to see about getting drop-off locations set back up in places like the Thompson Inn to make it easier for people to turn the bottles in, she said.

"A lot of the people picking up the sherry bottles were walking, so it is a fair distance to bring them here to the recycling centre," she said.

"So if we can get that established again, I think that might help bring up the process and collect more bottles for us."