Panaji, Mar 6 (IANS): That bottle, or those bottles of beer, which you may have left behind on a Goa beach on a holiday or a river-side picnic last year, may see redemption around the corner.

Nearly 40 lakh beer bottles are pushed out every month by three major beer bottling facilities in the state for beer guzzlers to relish, but the absence of a recycling market for the lakhs of spent beer bottles has resulted in pint and large beer bottles lying strewn around popular tourist sites, roads and the countryside.

The 'Beer Bottle Project', an initiative by a Goa-based centre for sustainability, Sensible Earth, aims to fill this gap with an objective to reduce the one-time usage of glass beer bottles in Goa by incentivising waste pickers, collaborating with local beer companies to reuse their own bottles and goad policy intervention to put an end to avoidable litter.

"We started the 'Beer Bottle Project' because we realised that beer bottles are becoming a huge problem, because people have started using glass as a single-use object, like they do with plastic. Glass actually takes much much longer, a million years, to degrade as compared to plastic which can take around 400 years," according to Jerusha D'Souza, spokesperson for Sensible Earth.

"So, actually from what we understand, there seems to be a space issue. Big companies still take their bottles back, but retail outlets are still not keen on doing it because they do not have the space to store empty bottles. Glass is expensive to transport, so even the transportation of bottles back and forth is becoming an issue. Manufacturing new bottles is cheaper than recycling old bottles," she said.

When asked what was the obvious trigger for coming up with the 'Beer Bottle Project', D'Souza said: "We realised that wherever we go, whether it is trekking up a hill or going to a beach or going for a picnic somewhere, there are beer bottles strewn around and there is nothing being done about it".

The Goa government has engaged private agencies to clear the beaches of garbage, but with millions of beer bottles hitting the market every year, the menace appears not an easy one to be rid of.

Beer is one of the most popular alcohols served in tropical Goa, with a recent study suggesting that for nearly every 1000 tourists visiting Goa, nearly 29 per cent preferred sipping on beer during their beach holiday, across age groups.

But the popularity of the fizzy alcoholic beverage has also manifested a litter menace on a monumental scale, with logistics and lack of obvious feasibility when it comes to recycling used beer bottles, becoming the nub of the issue.

"Right now what we want to do is get in touch with some of the local companies and figure out solutions around the issue, like where we can collect the bottles, maybe we can wash the bottles at a particular centre. This is still in the early stages. And hopefully we can bring about policy change at some point," she said.

Bottle deposits were once the norm for retail sale in Goa, where a retailer would take back an empty bottle and pay the customer back the deposit of Rs. 3 in return. The practice stopped as it proved cumbersome for retailers to stock empty bottles, which uses up store space.

"The best thing would be to bring back the deposit, in a way that it makes sense to all parties involved. People should be able to give back their bottles and be paid for it, thus incentivising customers. We would like to put the onus on the customer and making them aware that the bottle they are using is worth something," she said, adding that it was unfortunate that a glass bottle which is manufactured with a large amount of energy and resource footprint is just discarded after being used once.

"We want to sort of convey that this can be a two-pronged practice, which makes it feasible for waste-pickers to collect bottles at a better price, it just works for them as well as for the government because the beaches will be cleaner," D'Souza said.