Comments flooded a post on Facebook after one Wellington resident photographed the mess that had been dumped at the station and criticised the vandals. 

“How sad that someone dumped all their rubbish at the Return and Earn yesterday,” the post read. 

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“The guy that keeps our return machine clean does a fantastic job and doesn’t need to tolerate this.”

The machine in Wellington, located near the Woolworths store, was one of the first return and earn kiosks to be deployed within the state and has been used by local groups such as the Girl Guides and the Wellington Lions to help clean up the town and reduce waste. 

Several commentators on the original facebook post containing the image labelled the act of vandalism ‘disgusting’ while others called for the person responsible to located and fined. 

The machine outside Wellington’s Woolworths is currently cleaned and maintained by a single custodian and several commentors singled him out for praise noting that he does a ‘fantastic job’. 

A spokesperson for the NSW Environment Protection Authority noted that the site is cleaned frequently.

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“The site is cleaned by the Network Operator at least once a day, and when returning containers people are encouraged to be respectful of the return point and fellow returners by taking their rubbish with them or using the bins provided,” the spokesperson said.

“There have been no reports of rubbish to the Network Operator this year, but a report was received in mid0-December and the site was cleaned up that same day by the Network Operator.”

“The Wellington reverse vending machine has collected more than 3.5 million containers which have contributed to more than 1.2 billion containers collected across NSW since 1 December 2017.”

A 2018 poll conducted by the Wellington Times said 62% of users were satisfied with the machine.