After Pagan Hockley said yes to Andie Lickiss's marriage proposal on New Year's Eve, 2021, the pair began planning their wedding.

With a large extended family and the cost of living crisis at their heels, the loved-up couple grappled with the inevitable question — how to pay for the party?

"At first we had no idea how much it was going to cost, but once we started seeing the price of vendors, buying decorations and all those things, it was daunting," Mr Lickiss, 28, said.

His wife-to-be was already a fan of the Return and Earn scheme, a litter reduction initiative launched by the New South Wales government in 2017.

It pays a 10-cent refund per bottle, can, or carton returned for recycling.

"I'd been doing Return and Earn for years," Ms Lickiss, 29, said.

She would stack her ute with containers from family and friends and take up to 600 items per trip to the collection depot to make it worthwhile.

Big dreams in bottles

Eighteen months out from the wedding, Ms Lickiss wondered if the scheme could raise $5,000 for a wedding photographer.

Thinking big, the couple posted a plea for containers on Dubbo's community Facebook page.

"What's the worst that could happen? People can say no," Ms Lickiss said.

Instead, people said yes — thousands of times over.

"The community response was massive, absolutely massive," Ms Lickiss said.

Supply chain logistics

In the months after their initial post they experimented with ways to pick up and transport the containers in bulk.

They decided to use the heavy duty 240-litre wheelie bins that most households use for council rubbish collection.

Another call-out on Dubbo's community Facebook page for old bins again gained strong support and strangers handed over bins already filled with recyclable bottles.

"You don't always expect people to give like that, and being on social media, sometimes there can be a lot of negative people that express themselves," Mr Lickiss said.

Within a year they had returned more than 60,000 bottles and earned more than $6,000.

They had surpassed their target, but with the system in place, they decided to keep going.

'They'd see us coming'

There is only one depot in Dubbo that allows bulk returns, where a machine counts the cartons instead of manually feeding bottles in one at a time.

Fortnightly trips to the facility became the norm, with depot staff asking for updates on the wedding fund tally.

"They'd see us coming and they'd clear a whole machine for us," Ms Lickiss said.

Organisations also invited the couple to collect bottles after weekly work drinks or larger events such as football matches and community festivals.

A week out from the wedding, the pair dropped off their final load.

They had returned 111,275 containers and raised a grand total of $11,127.50.

Eleven billion returns

Return and Earn chief executive Danielle Smalley said the scheme had refunded more than $1.1 billion statewide since it began.

"Eleven billion bottles, cans, and cartons have been returned through the network since 2017, which is just extraordinary," she said.

Ms Smalley said the official fundraising register had tracked more than $54 million raised by charities and community groups.

"That $54 million is a staggering figure, [but] we know it's even much larger than that," she said.

"What we don't track is all the schools and sporting groups and community groups who do their own fundraising.

Future looking bright

Having wed in September 2023, the couple have their sights set on other goals.

A pre-wedding Facebook post last September about their last Return and Earn run received multiple responses from people saying they wanted to keep donating.

With 15 regular clients and the odd message requesting a pick-up, they have continued collecting.

So what lies on the horizon?

"A big trip overseas or renovations on the house," Ms Lickiss said.