Is it a major loss in profit or do current bottles make it impossible?
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At least in Canada they absolutely do reuse glass beer bottles many times. I don’t think plastic bottles can be reused but they are made into new bottles as far as I know.
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Unless you’re a large mfg, it’s generally going to be less expensive to purchase new sterile glass containers.
The startup cost to reuse (take in dirty, wash and sterilize) is high. You need a lot of volume to get it down to where it’s more cost effective to recycle.
All beer bottles here in Ontario, Canada are recycled. Something like 98% reuse. And all liquor, spirits and wine bottles can be recycled at the same store (dunno how many are reused vs. just recycled). So its not like the infrastructure can’t exist or work. And you can get milk in 1L glass bottles now that you return for a deposit.
I’d be totally down for all juices and sodas to go back to glass bottles. Which, might be sooner than we thought given that Canada just made most single use plastics outlaw come December. But pop and juice bottles here are typically the bulk of our blue bin plastics that ARE successfully recycled, so who knows.
Unlike glass bottles, There’s no way to clean plastic bottles thoroughly enough to be safely reused as food containers (in a commercial sense; you can wash and reuse plastic for personal re-use a few times before it gets too gross) without destroying them. Even when you recycle them they are mostly recycled into something a ‘step down’ like car parts, and rarely become bottles again. Glass bottles can be fully recycled and since the process involves melting the bottles it’s possible to make the end product food-safe sanitary again.
However, even glass bottles don’t frequently get reused because the logistics of getting a bottle back to the distributor would require a whole team of people to support the collection, cleanup, and transport of the bottles. Human labor costs scale poorly compared to new materials costs so most companies choose to just use new bottles instead of trying to reclaim old ones
I can’t speak for plastic, but for glass it’s a branding thing. They used to recycle bottles in the US, and you could get a Miller in an old Corona bottle for example. Now everyone “needs” their niche bottle shape.
This doesn’t apply to all companies of course, but enough of them do this that they won’t just reuse them.
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Getting product to customers requires shipping it there somehow, in the US this is typically on a truck. Glass is much, much heavier than plastic, meaning less product can fit on these trucks.
The North American consumer supply chain is also oriented in a forward distribution manner, meaning that product are flowed from manufacturing, through distribution centers where product is deconsolidated and mixed with other freight for ultimate delivery to the end customer. If you consider returnable containers, this is a separate supply chain which is not as optimized as it’s going the wrong direction.
To further complicate this, consider the variety of packaging sizes and shapes that exist, each of them would need to be redirected to the correct origin point. Now we’re talking about a completely separate business just to manage the returnable containers. Someone has to purchase these containers, and then also manage the cleaning and sortation of the containers.
TL;DR – Glass is heavy (more weight = more cost), and supply chains run really well in one direction, going the other way is expensive.
At least in the USA aluminum is actually super easy to recycle. And we have all the infrastructure in place to do it efficiently. So cans are your least environmental impact way to consume a beverage.
Glass bottles are sometimes recycled. But rather than take them back and wash them, it’s often easier to just smash em and melt em down and make new bottles. Also there a bit of hazard to the collectors and sorters of glass, which is why a lot of municipalities just don’t.
Plastic are just a nightmare, logistically, to recycle. You’ll notice that the bottom of a plastic item typically has the recycle logo with a number? Yeah if you don’t sort by that number it’s all going to landfill. End of discussion. There’s also a lot of those numbers (some of the most common ones as it happens) that straight up cannot be recycled. They will be in their current form, or the shredded version of it, forever.
Anyway, most plastic recycling depends heavily on government subsidies to be viable. As without governments literally paying them extra money to do it, these businesses operate at massive losses.
From most to least recyclable it goes something like:
* Metals
* Ceramics
* Plastics
* Organics
There are a few small Milk companies that offer Glass Bottles. I live in Plano, Texas and the company that manufactures those here is 1836 Farms, the Store charges us a 2.00 fee for the bottle, and we get it back, when we return the bottle.
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