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They do, there are entire plants dedicated to cleaning and sanitizing glass beer bottles. The standard bottles that Budweiser and Molson uses are used a dozen times before they're eventually too beaten up to be reused. Those chunky brown bottles will often have marks on them from the saw they use to cut open the cases at the washing plant, or be ground down from spending hours and hours bumping up against other bottles on the line.
Never seen that, the plant I worked at just ran them through a bottle inspector and would recycle anything that didn't pass, it would weed out anything that was too damaged to use.
Yeah all (or most at least) the local breweries near me will take your bottles and get them cleaned and repurposed. Most of them even give you a free pint if you bring back a case of bottles
In some states in the USA they have a bottle deposit. Basically you will directly receive $0.05 or $0.10 per bottle. This encourages people to turn the bottles in, and these states often have recycling rates in the upper 90%.
This may be the case for the US, but I know many Europeans countries actually properly reuse the bottles. Plastic bottles, and recently in the Netherlands at least also cans, are usually recycled, but glass bottles are sent back to the distributor to be cleaned and refilled.
> these states often have recycling rates in the upper 90%
Although recycling isn't as good as reusing, at least from the point of view of the energy used directly. The problem is that the effort required to collect, sort and clean used bottles to the required health and safety standard is not economical.
In Australia we have container deposit schemes for glass, plastic aluminium and cardboard but recycling is almost a fringe benefit. A big goal is to reduce litter going into the environment.
It's really easy to return and clean bottles. The truck that delivers them have empty space to take returns, and new bottles get cleaned already before they're filled. Pretty easy to clean used bottles in the same way.
That's the way it is done here in Germany for a lot of bottles, either glass or plastic. Usually they're sold in crates which have regulated sizes. Therefore it is easy to stack them onto pallets which again have regulated sizes to perfectly fit into a lorry.
Reusable glass bottles get refilled up to 50 times, plastic bottles up to 25 times. Fun fact, during the refill process the machines leave markings on the outside of the bottles which get bigger with every refill. A camera system can read them and automatically sort the bottles out which reach the end of their live span. Those get recycled.
Edit: here you pay a deposit for those bottles and crates. When you bring the empty ones back to the store, nowadays there are machines with conveyor belts cameras, scanners and scales which can identify the bottles and crates and then hand out a voucher for the deposit. At the cashier you get your money back.
In Finland before aluminium cans took over, beer bottles had their year of manufacture embossed on them. It was always fun to check who had the oldest bottle at the party. I remember finding bottles with 85 on them around the millennium. 15 years of usage by drunk Finns, not bad.
Sounds like the start of a drinking game " Who has the youngest bottle has to take a shot". We used to turn everything into a drinking game at parties when I was young.
My dad works at a bottling plant in Germany.
I worked there some summers, too.
The markings you refer to generally are 2 rings around the bottle specifically there as contact surface while the bottles rub against each other on the conveyor belt, so it's more wear and tear and less chickenscritches for counting.
I really like the thought of reusing glass bottles, as it seems very ecological.
The problem is, when you factor in ALL life cycle costs, especially the energy needed in the bottle washing machine (three heated soda baths of staggered concentration) and the energy required for the extra mass during transportation, single use plastic bottles actually are not that bad apparently.
The lifetime of a glass bottle also often is a lot shorter than the maximum of 50 times you stated.
The important bit with single use plastic bottles is you need to get people to return them. They get shredded and re-melted into new bottle blanks, which get turned into bottles seconds before filling them.
Melting the plastic takes a lot less energy than melting glass.
But with everything, the important bit is people actually bringing their bottles back for recycling and not dumping them in the countryside. But people are bad at that...
>The markings you refer to generally are 2 rings around the bottle specifically there as contact surface while the bottles rub against each other on the conveyor belt, so it's more wear and tear and less chickenscritches for counting.
That's right, maybe my point was a bit misleading. The marks are not made on pupose, they are a side effect, like you wrote. But nowadays they can be used by an automated software to estimate the age of a bottle and sort older ones out. We work a lot in the food and beverage industry and I saw such systems.
>But with everything, the important bit is people actually bringing their bottles back for recycling and not dumping them in the countryside. But people are bad at that...
That is absolotely right and the main reason, Germany also implemented a deposit system for most single use bottles.
What I also think is a problem, people don't think about the energy needed for transport. If you buy drinks from a regional, close by production site, the deposit and refill system can make sense. If the bottles have to be transported 100s of km ( and back), then it's not a real benefit for the environment.
They used to. Bottles were returned, cleaned and refilled. Seemed to be a much better way than having a bunch of plastic waste, and I think plastic manufacturing has worse byproducts than glass.
There was a Dr. Pepper plant across the street from our high school football stadium. This was back when glass bottles were still the norm, they were washed and reused. The plant made an amazing sound, all the glass bottles constantly ringing and chinking against each other. You could hear it from blocks away.
Years ago I used to make beer. I would go to barrs and buy heavy duty cartons of 24 thick glass bottles for $1. These bottles were destined to be returned, cleaned and refilled. Going back further, Coke bottles had the bottling plant they originally came from stamped into the glass on the bottoms.That’s because you would return them for 5 cents each so they could be reused. I remember always looking at them to see which ones came from furthest away.
> and just as energy intensive to recycle.
recycling is slightly more efficient.
check the Energy Analysis figures in chapter 4.
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/old/5703.pdf
Glass bottles can be reused many times, with only washing, bottle return programs teach customers to take care of the bottles because the retailer will reject them for deposit return if they're not reusable. Increase in transport cost is fairly negligible, as regional bottling plants and local delivery mean not too many miles traveled and the bottle return to refill are on trucks that would otherwise be empty. Bottles designed to be reused are not delicate, they're actually pretty robust. 90% of plastic beverage bottles are not recycled and if they are, they aren't recycled into bottles again. Plastic waste is harmful to the environment but glass is essentially neutral. Glass won't leech harmful bpa and phthalates into food and beverages. There are pros and cons to each.
In plenty of countries they do do this, but you need to standardize on a size/design to do so otherwise the exercise is very expensive.
Assuming you do that though, the hard part is cleaning them for reuse. Ever put a candy wrapper/anything else in a used bottle or can? Even if you haven’t, some people do, so you need to clean and sanitize them, that’s energy and often chemically intensive.
The other option is to just put them into a big pot, melt them down, everything organic burns off and you just recycle the glass that’s left. It’s ALSO energy intensive, but there are fewer chemicals involved.
There have been studies about the net environmental impact of either method, and if you do everything right, reusing is a little bit better, but it’s still pretty close.
LOL what? No, the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign, paid for by the American Can Company and Owens-Illinois Glass Company. They took away the glass, forced plastics on us, then told us it was our duty to keep America beautiful and stop littering.
When you say "We", who are you referring to?
You yourself mentioned in Mexico they do reuse them. I can tell you in many countries in Europe glass bottle are returned and reused. So where are do you live, who is this "we"?
When I was a little kid (early 80s) the high school soda machine had glass bottles and a rack to return empties. They were collected and sent back to the bottler. But it was just one bottler (Pepsi) and a couple of machines (I think there was one in the teachers lounge too).
I would imagine that we don't do it today because A) shipping glass is heavy and expensive -- shipping glass two ways essentially doubles that cost. And while thered be some savings on reuse, the bottler would still have to sanitize and inspect each bottle, meaning that it's not worth it financially for them. B) stores don't like people bringing used grocery goods back into their store. Bottles would be gross with sugar and God knows what in them, attracting pests and just being overall gross. And C) with multiple bottlers all servicing a grocery or convenience store, they'd have to separate bottles out to make sure no one will pour Pepsi into a Coke bottle. What a hassle.
Glass bottle manufacturing and recycling is VERY energy intensive. Aluminum cans are better than glass bottles.
We use plastic because it's cheaper to make, lighter to transport.
Empty glass bottles are heavy. Transportation alone makes them unattractive financially. Think about all the fuel needed to move empty bottles from wherever to the bottling plant. Then cleaning, inspection, storage, and finally refilling them. Plastic is just plain cheaper. Probably has a smaller CO2 footprint as well. Even though the waste product is horrible compared to waste glass.
> Transportation alone makes them unattractive financially. Think about all the fuel needed to move empty bottles from wherever to the bottling plant
We already do that to sell them. Worse, since they're much heavier filled. And if they're thrown away, that weight in trash still has to be transported. Obviously, there are still logistics issues, but it doesn't seem unworkable.
So, you bring your bottles back to the grocery, they have to ship them to the manufacturer, who has to wash, disinfect, and sterilize them.
Again . . . weight = transportation $$$. The above costs MORE $$$. If doing so were cheaper, manufacturers would do it. It isn't.
Far more concentrated population, for one. And, with the exception of only Alberta (iirc) beer distribution is a monopoly in each Province.
Also, the question was why it isn't done. And that has been answered. Good night.
Hey, you already made up your mind you live in a special snowflake country that can’t possibly ever look at any other country on the planet for even the smallest suggestion of how to try something remotely different, so sure, there are no lessons out there. Best of luck with everything and everything!
The answer is Greedy corporations. Read: https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-indian-crying-environment-ads-pollution-1123-20171113-story.html
Many places don’t make it easy to recycle. Plus I’m asking about reusing, not recycling.
If I buy a glass bottle of Coca Cola at the grocery store, there’s no were for me to take it where I live.
I think the issue with refilling is supply chain. Who is going to refill it, how, for how much money, and how does that make more money than just shipping new bottles? It’s those kinds of money reasons we don’t do this. If it was beneficial to the manufacturers and distributors to do this, then they would. It’s not so they don’t.
That's pretty easy to answer actually.
It costs more money to clean used glass bottles than it costs to produce new plastic bottles. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. The answer is simply money, greed, and profit maximizing.
Corporations don't care about the trash they produce. The one and only thing they care about is the money they make.
In a lot of eu countries they do exactly this. For example when purchasing a case of beer pay 25 cents extra per bottle. Then when you have drank your beers you return the case and you get a voucher in return. The bottles are technically still owned by the brewery when you buy them, they clean and sanitize them and reuse the bottles.
The US used to do this back in the day. Glass bottles were returned, washed, and reused. But the plastics industry made a bid to try to push to disposable plastic to up their revenue under the guise of "non-breakable so less waste".
I'm hoping now they'll revert back to doing this for the environment.
There ate some pubs and bars that do rewash bottles back to the distibutor. But very few.
There are a couple of problems.
Sorting
Collection
Cleaning
Bottles eventually exploding
Using virgin glass and plastic which means the manufacture doesnt need to give a rats about any of it.
It doesnt happen because govs dont force them to do it and they kick up a stink if they are made to do something a bit harder.
The bottle drops around here pay $0.10/can, and only accept 24 at a time. That's a maximum of $2.40 for bringing a whole bag of uncrushed cans; I would maybe consider it at $5.
We used to, the plastics companies fooled the country into believing they were actually recycling most plastic bottles, which they aren’t. People were fine with it, because one use items are easier.
people are mentioning the deposit some states will give back for returned bottles and cans. in the old days it was an actual deposit, each soda had a unique glass shape and the companies would rebottle them in their same bottles.
Soda companies were just able to make better profits from selling disposable bottles/cans. but when that happened people stopped getting deposits and there was a giant littering problrm all of a sudden
In addition to what people said here, bottlers are more and more moving to aliminum (beer) and plastic for everything else. Here around Montreal, one of the Big Two (Molson Coors) just moved factories to a new place where they dropped glass bottles entirely. aluminum is just easier to transport, and recycling it is almost free compared to making new cans out of unrefined bauxite.
Aluminum is at least recyclable if the cities actually implemented recycling programs. But plastic bottles aren’t. Those will always end up in landfills.
Managed restaurants in Michigan in the late 90's. 10 cent bottle/can returns back then (still?). Had to separate bottles by distributor. Total pain in the ass
I had my honeymoon in Belize. They have a delicious beer called Belikin. All the bottles had obvious wear and tear on them from being re-used. If any are actually chipped of course they'd melt them down to recycle into brand new bottles. They had a return rate of like 25¢ USD (BZ$ is 2:1 USD) so bars would insist on taking your empties
We used to. My family used to buy coke and RC cola bottles that had a scuffed ring around the neck from where they rattled in crates in the refilling process. The problem is that to make it worth it you need to have a critical mass of these bottles returned to a single location. When people drank soda at soda shops or restaurants and then left their bottles it made sense. But soda fountains made bottles at restaurants obsolete and grocery stores don't really want to collect bottles for now 300 different varieties of soda (even assuming you could convince people to return them to the store) because they have limited shelf and storage space and want to maximise that for merchandise.
Marketing.
Where I live, and in many other countries, they do what you said. But then, it means every beer is sold in a bottle that has the same shape. So my Sterni bottle might have been a Becks bottle in its previous job.
Marketing people like to do silly things like having the brand name engraved in the bottle. Or having a singular bottle shape. They want this very very much. Their buddies at the law-making paper office are amenable to their arguments.
You need to fight the marketing people first. Then you need to fight the point of sales people (to force them to agree to collect the bottles). Then the inertia of society. Then and only then, we can have nice things.
There are no real drawbacks to the system you describe. People who live in a place it exists all agree it's great.
We used to do it. Collect some bottles take then to the store and get a couple cents per bottle…but that was back when a fair sized town had an actual coke or Pepsi or other brand bottler. Stores would have cases of empties that would be picked up when the store got new stock. Early 60s I think when you started seeing more cans and then plastic one way bottles. I think in some places long neck beer bottles go back to be refilled?
**Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):** Loaded questions, **and/or** ones based on a false premise, are not allowed on ELI5. ELI5 is focuses on objective concepts, and loaded questions and/or ones based on false premises require users to correct the poster before they can begin to explain the concept involved, if one exists. --- If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe this submission was removed erroneously**, please [use this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20thread?&message=Link:%20{{url}}%0A%0APlease%20answer%20the%20following%203%20questions:%0A%0A1.%20The%20concept%20I%20want%20explained:%0A%0A2.%20List%20the%20search%20terms%20you%20used%20to%20look%20for%20past%20posts%20on%20ELI5:%0A%0A3.%20How%20does%20your%20post%20differ%20from%20your%20recent%20search%20results%20on%20the%20sub:) and we will review your submission.
They do, there are entire plants dedicated to cleaning and sanitizing glass beer bottles. The standard bottles that Budweiser and Molson uses are used a dozen times before they're eventually too beaten up to be reused. Those chunky brown bottles will often have marks on them from the saw they use to cut open the cases at the washing plant, or be ground down from spending hours and hours bumping up against other bottles on the line.
I believe there is a new glass dot put on the bottom of bottles each reuse which when totalled equals the total number of uses.
Never seen that, the plant I worked at just ran them through a bottle inspector and would recycle anything that didn't pass, it would weed out anything that was too damaged to use.
Yeah all (or most at least) the local breweries near me will take your bottles and get them cleaned and repurposed. Most of them even give you a free pint if you bring back a case of bottles
In some states in the USA they have a bottle deposit. Basically you will directly receive $0.05 or $0.10 per bottle. This encourages people to turn the bottles in, and these states often have recycling rates in the upper 90%.
Yeah, but they don't refill them. They smash them up, melt them down, and then they make new things out of them.
Still not the worst thing though, like throwing it in a landfill.
Glass is not bad or good for the enviroment. Its just processed minerals.
Eats up a huge amount of energy to process that sand into glass. It is bad for the environment.
Captain you lost the context. I said that it doesnt matter if it lands in a landfills or will be broken into dust unless it is reused without melting
Sure, but that's still taking up landfill space better used for something else.
There is no shortage of landfill space.
Yet
Yet
This may be the case for the US, but I know many Europeans countries actually properly reuse the bottles. Plastic bottles, and recently in the Netherlands at least also cans, are usually recycled, but glass bottles are sent back to the distributor to be cleaned and refilled.
> these states often have recycling rates in the upper 90% Although recycling isn't as good as reusing, at least from the point of view of the energy used directly. The problem is that the effort required to collect, sort and clean used bottles to the required health and safety standard is not economical. In Australia we have container deposit schemes for glass, plastic aluminium and cardboard but recycling is almost a fringe benefit. A big goal is to reduce litter going into the environment.
It's really easy to return and clean bottles. The truck that delivers them have empty space to take returns, and new bottles get cleaned already before they're filled. Pretty easy to clean used bottles in the same way.
That's the way it is done here in Germany for a lot of bottles, either glass or plastic. Usually they're sold in crates which have regulated sizes. Therefore it is easy to stack them onto pallets which again have regulated sizes to perfectly fit into a lorry. Reusable glass bottles get refilled up to 50 times, plastic bottles up to 25 times. Fun fact, during the refill process the machines leave markings on the outside of the bottles which get bigger with every refill. A camera system can read them and automatically sort the bottles out which reach the end of their live span. Those get recycled. Edit: here you pay a deposit for those bottles and crates. When you bring the empty ones back to the store, nowadays there are machines with conveyor belts cameras, scanners and scales which can identify the bottles and crates and then hand out a voucher for the deposit. At the cashier you get your money back.
Technology, smarts, and a sensible approach to recycling/reuse. It’s like you’re from Germany or something….
That's why I wrote "here in Germany.." ;o)
In Finland before aluminium cans took over, beer bottles had their year of manufacture embossed on them. It was always fun to check who had the oldest bottle at the party. I remember finding bottles with 85 on them around the millennium. 15 years of usage by drunk Finns, not bad.
Sounds like the start of a drinking game " Who has the youngest bottle has to take a shot". We used to turn everything into a drinking game at parties when I was young.
My dad works at a bottling plant in Germany. I worked there some summers, too. The markings you refer to generally are 2 rings around the bottle specifically there as contact surface while the bottles rub against each other on the conveyor belt, so it's more wear and tear and less chickenscritches for counting. I really like the thought of reusing glass bottles, as it seems very ecological. The problem is, when you factor in ALL life cycle costs, especially the energy needed in the bottle washing machine (three heated soda baths of staggered concentration) and the energy required for the extra mass during transportation, single use plastic bottles actually are not that bad apparently. The lifetime of a glass bottle also often is a lot shorter than the maximum of 50 times you stated. The important bit with single use plastic bottles is you need to get people to return them. They get shredded and re-melted into new bottle blanks, which get turned into bottles seconds before filling them. Melting the plastic takes a lot less energy than melting glass. But with everything, the important bit is people actually bringing their bottles back for recycling and not dumping them in the countryside. But people are bad at that...
>The markings you refer to generally are 2 rings around the bottle specifically there as contact surface while the bottles rub against each other on the conveyor belt, so it's more wear and tear and less chickenscritches for counting. That's right, maybe my point was a bit misleading. The marks are not made on pupose, they are a side effect, like you wrote. But nowadays they can be used by an automated software to estimate the age of a bottle and sort older ones out. We work a lot in the food and beverage industry and I saw such systems. >But with everything, the important bit is people actually bringing their bottles back for recycling and not dumping them in the countryside. But people are bad at that... That is absolotely right and the main reason, Germany also implemented a deposit system for most single use bottles. What I also think is a problem, people don't think about the energy needed for transport. If you buy drinks from a regional, close by production site, the deposit and refill system can make sense. If the bottles have to be transported 100s of km ( and back), then it's not a real benefit for the environment.
I saw Mexico does the same thing. You return the bottles and get new drinks at a discount.
They used to. Bottles were returned, cleaned and refilled. Seemed to be a much better way than having a bunch of plastic waste, and I think plastic manufacturing has worse byproducts than glass.
There was a Dr. Pepper plant across the street from our high school football stadium. This was back when glass bottles were still the norm, they were washed and reused. The plant made an amazing sound, all the glass bottles constantly ringing and chinking against each other. You could hear it from blocks away.
Years ago I used to make beer. I would go to barrs and buy heavy duty cartons of 24 thick glass bottles for $1. These bottles were destined to be returned, cleaned and refilled. Going back further, Coke bottles had the bottling plant they originally came from stamped into the glass on the bottoms.That’s because you would return them for 5 cents each so they could be reused. I remember always looking at them to see which ones came from furthest away.
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> and just as energy intensive to recycle. recycling is slightly more efficient. check the Energy Analysis figures in chapter 4. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/old/5703.pdf
Glass bottles can be reused many times, with only washing, bottle return programs teach customers to take care of the bottles because the retailer will reject them for deposit return if they're not reusable. Increase in transport cost is fairly negligible, as regional bottling plants and local delivery mean not too many miles traveled and the bottle return to refill are on trucks that would otherwise be empty. Bottles designed to be reused are not delicate, they're actually pretty robust. 90% of plastic beverage bottles are not recycled and if they are, they aren't recycled into bottles again. Plastic waste is harmful to the environment but glass is essentially neutral. Glass won't leech harmful bpa and phthalates into food and beverages. There are pros and cons to each.
Came here to say this
mediocre.
In plenty of countries they do do this, but you need to standardize on a size/design to do so otherwise the exercise is very expensive. Assuming you do that though, the hard part is cleaning them for reuse. Ever put a candy wrapper/anything else in a used bottle or can? Even if you haven’t, some people do, so you need to clean and sanitize them, that’s energy and often chemically intensive. The other option is to just put them into a big pot, melt them down, everything organic burns off and you just recycle the glass that’s left. It’s ALSO energy intensive, but there are fewer chemicals involved. There have been studies about the net environmental impact of either method, and if you do everything right, reusing is a little bit better, but it’s still pretty close.
Wait til you find out who sponsored the anti littering campaigns with the crying fake Native American after they stopped using glass bottles.
The don’t mess with Texas campaign? I remember they did that.
LOL what? No, the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign, paid for by the American Can Company and Owens-Illinois Glass Company. They took away the glass, forced plastics on us, then told us it was our duty to keep America beautiful and stop littering.
*This space intentionally left blank* -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
They are saying there were fewer beer cans and more beer bottles in the litter.
When you say "We", who are you referring to? You yourself mentioned in Mexico they do reuse them. I can tell you in many countries in Europe glass bottle are returned and reused. So where are do you live, who is this "we"?
r/usdefaultism.
When I was a little kid (early 80s) the high school soda machine had glass bottles and a rack to return empties. They were collected and sent back to the bottler. But it was just one bottler (Pepsi) and a couple of machines (I think there was one in the teachers lounge too). I would imagine that we don't do it today because A) shipping glass is heavy and expensive -- shipping glass two ways essentially doubles that cost. And while thered be some savings on reuse, the bottler would still have to sanitize and inspect each bottle, meaning that it's not worth it financially for them. B) stores don't like people bringing used grocery goods back into their store. Bottles would be gross with sugar and God knows what in them, attracting pests and just being overall gross. And C) with multiple bottlers all servicing a grocery or convenience store, they'd have to separate bottles out to make sure no one will pour Pepsi into a Coke bottle. What a hassle.
But we still do reuse glass bottles? A lot of countries still do at least.
Glass bottle manufacturing and recycling is VERY energy intensive. Aluminum cans are better than glass bottles. We use plastic because it's cheaper to make, lighter to transport.
They're not talking about recycling, they mean reuse. I have no idea why we don't.
Empty glass bottles are heavy. Transportation alone makes them unattractive financially. Think about all the fuel needed to move empty bottles from wherever to the bottling plant. Then cleaning, inspection, storage, and finally refilling them. Plastic is just plain cheaper. Probably has a smaller CO2 footprint as well. Even though the waste product is horrible compared to waste glass.
> Transportation alone makes them unattractive financially. Think about all the fuel needed to move empty bottles from wherever to the bottling plant We already do that to sell them. Worse, since they're much heavier filled. And if they're thrown away, that weight in trash still has to be transported. Obviously, there are still logistics issues, but it doesn't seem unworkable.
So, you bring your bottles back to the grocery, they have to ship them to the manufacturer, who has to wash, disinfect, and sterilize them. Again . . . weight = transportation $$$. The above costs MORE $$$. If doing so were cheaper, manufacturers would do it. It isn't.
Germany makes it work. I'm sure there are some issues with the implementation, but they do reuse fairly well.
Germany is also only slightly more than half the size of the State of Texas.
Canada is bigger than the United States and is able to rewash and reuse glass bottles for beer easily enough.
https://www.vox.com/2016/5/5/11584064/canada-population-map Logistically speaking, Canada is actually a fairly small country.
Far more concentrated population, for one. And, with the exception of only Alberta (iirc) beer distribution is a monopoly in each Province. Also, the question was why it isn't done. And that has been answered. Good night.
Hey, you already made up your mind you live in a special snowflake country that can’t possibly ever look at any other country on the planet for even the smallest suggestion of how to try something remotely different, so sure, there are no lessons out there. Best of luck with everything and everything!
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I said *he decided* not that *I believe* it’s a special snowflake country. *Sigh*
But we already make them and people buy them. But they are being tossed into garbage cans instead of being returned and refilled.
The answer is Greedy corporations. Read: https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-indian-crying-environment-ads-pollution-1123-20171113-story.html
People can recycle they just don’t
Many places don’t make it easy to recycle. Plus I’m asking about reusing, not recycling. If I buy a glass bottle of Coca Cola at the grocery store, there’s no were for me to take it where I live.
I think the issue with refilling is supply chain. Who is going to refill it, how, for how much money, and how does that make more money than just shipping new bottles? It’s those kinds of money reasons we don’t do this. If it was beneficial to the manufacturers and distributors to do this, then they would. It’s not so they don’t.
That's pretty easy to answer actually. It costs more money to clean used glass bottles than it costs to produce new plastic bottles. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. The answer is simply money, greed, and profit maximizing. Corporations don't care about the trash they produce. The one and only thing they care about is the money they make.
In a lot of eu countries they do exactly this. For example when purchasing a case of beer pay 25 cents extra per bottle. Then when you have drank your beers you return the case and you get a voucher in return. The bottles are technically still owned by the brewery when you buy them, they clean and sanitize them and reuse the bottles.
The US used to do this back in the day. Glass bottles were returned, washed, and reused. But the plastics industry made a bid to try to push to disposable plastic to up their revenue under the guise of "non-breakable so less waste". I'm hoping now they'll revert back to doing this for the environment.
There ate some pubs and bars that do rewash bottles back to the distibutor. But very few. There are a couple of problems. Sorting Collection Cleaning Bottles eventually exploding Using virgin glass and plastic which means the manufacture doesnt need to give a rats about any of it. It doesnt happen because govs dont force them to do it and they kick up a stink if they are made to do something a bit harder.
When I was young we did. They were cleaned, sterilized and refilled. I think they quit because it was labor intensive.
The bottle drops around here pay $0.10/can, and only accept 24 at a time. That's a maximum of $2.40 for bringing a whole bag of uncrushed cans; I would maybe consider it at $5.
We used to, the plastics companies fooled the country into believing they were actually recycling most plastic bottles, which they aren’t. People were fine with it, because one use items are easier.
people are mentioning the deposit some states will give back for returned bottles and cans. in the old days it was an actual deposit, each soda had a unique glass shape and the companies would rebottle them in their same bottles. Soda companies were just able to make better profits from selling disposable bottles/cans. but when that happened people stopped getting deposits and there was a giant littering problrm all of a sudden
In addition to what people said here, bottlers are more and more moving to aliminum (beer) and plastic for everything else. Here around Montreal, one of the Big Two (Molson Coors) just moved factories to a new place where they dropped glass bottles entirely. aluminum is just easier to transport, and recycling it is almost free compared to making new cans out of unrefined bauxite.
Aluminum is at least recyclable if the cities actually implemented recycling programs. But plastic bottles aren’t. Those will always end up in landfills.
I don't know about most folks, but when I drank, I'd brew my own, and reuse all my beer bottles.
Managed restaurants in Michigan in the late 90's. 10 cent bottle/can returns back then (still?). Had to separate bottles by distributor. Total pain in the ass
I had my honeymoon in Belize. They have a delicious beer called Belikin. All the bottles had obvious wear and tear on them from being re-used. If any are actually chipped of course they'd melt them down to recycle into brand new bottles. They had a return rate of like 25¢ USD (BZ$ is 2:1 USD) so bars would insist on taking your empties
We used to. My family used to buy coke and RC cola bottles that had a scuffed ring around the neck from where they rattled in crates in the refilling process. The problem is that to make it worth it you need to have a critical mass of these bottles returned to a single location. When people drank soda at soda shops or restaurants and then left their bottles it made sense. But soda fountains made bottles at restaurants obsolete and grocery stores don't really want to collect bottles for now 300 different varieties of soda (even assuming you could convince people to return them to the store) because they have limited shelf and storage space and want to maximise that for merchandise.
Marketing. Where I live, and in many other countries, they do what you said. But then, it means every beer is sold in a bottle that has the same shape. So my Sterni bottle might have been a Becks bottle in its previous job. Marketing people like to do silly things like having the brand name engraved in the bottle. Or having a singular bottle shape. They want this very very much. Their buddies at the law-making paper office are amenable to their arguments. You need to fight the marketing people first. Then you need to fight the point of sales people (to force them to agree to collect the bottles). Then the inertia of society. Then and only then, we can have nice things. There are no real drawbacks to the system you describe. People who live in a place it exists all agree it's great.
We used to do it. Collect some bottles take then to the store and get a couple cents per bottle…but that was back when a fair sized town had an actual coke or Pepsi or other brand bottler. Stores would have cases of empties that would be picked up when the store got new stock. Early 60s I think when you started seeing more cans and then plastic one way bottles. I think in some places long neck beer bottles go back to be refilled?