Cash for Cans! Well….bottles.

Growing up, I always looked at the coke bottles that said you could return the bottle for 5 cents; however, you could never do that in Texas and that always puzzled me. Well, here in Uruguay you can definitely turn in your bottles. Following up on Brad’s post on 7 Tips on How to Save Money Around the House, this is one way I’ve found out I could save some money here in Montevideo. How exactly does one return there bottles? Come along with me to my grocery store (Devoto) and see how!

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After having so many people over to our house for events, hang-outs, a special someone’s 1st birthday party, and just living daily life, you start to accumulate lots of coke bottles (and by coke, I mean any sort of soft drink…aka “pop”).

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The bottles have to say “retornable” or “returnable” on them (normal plastic bottles aren’t always returnable).

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When you go into our grocery store, you look for the machine to return your bottles.

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You stick the bottles in the hole. After the machine reads the machines, a receipt pops out with how much credit you received from your bottles.

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For example, this time I turned in 21 bottles of pop and got 189 Uruguayan Pesos of credit. This equals approximately $10 (assuming an exchange rate of $1US=18.85 UY Pesos). For reference, the other day I bought 4 returnable bottles of coke for 160 pesos, which is about $8.50.

We’ve found that by using the returnable bottles, we not only save money on the initial purchase (returnable bottles are cheaper than the normal plastic bottles) but we also save money by returning the bottles for credit. I take it as a challenge…and it’s kinda fun at the same time 🙂