Is it a major loss in profit or do current bottles make it impossible?
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In Japan there are still milk delivery men that deliver and collect in glass bottles. Obviously it’s a dying tradition though.
Large sake bottles (1.8L) and large beer bottles used in restaurants (500/630ml) are also collected (or you can bring them back yourself) which grants you a small return fee (10 yen) per bottle and the bottles then get washed and reused.
Pretty common here in The Philippines were you leave a deposit for the bottle, then get the deposit back after you return it.
That’s just America. In Australia we get paid 10 cents for each bottle we recycle. It’s not much but it encourages it. Let’s you do a maccas run every now and then
Hey there little buddy, great question. The simple answer is that they wouldn’t make as much money if they they did that. By charging you for a new bottle every time they profit from the beverage but also they sell you the bottle at a higher price than it cost them to make. Should they give up some profits to limit their waste? Well yeah, they probably should. But the funny thing about corporations is that they are bound by fiduciary law (basically they HAVE to) profit as much as possible for their shareholders. If they make choices that limit profits it has to be approved by a majority vote from the people who own the company. In the case of a corporation that’s usually millions of people. It’s very hard to convince millions of people to give up even a small amount of money.
Several small independent dairies do.
But glass is expensive and energy-intensive to transport.
I used to be a milk deliverer in Australia in the 90’s and we still reused glass milk bottles. Every so often someone would find a chip of broken glass in their milk and they’d have to do a huge recall and suffer massive reputational damage because it’s the stuff of children’s nightmares. Eventually they just switched to single-use cartons.
You can’t control what has happened to that bottle in someone’s house, so the risk of there being cracks or chips or the like is hard to manage
Where are you? U.S. soda companies all did that up into the ’80s.
The customer paid a per-bottle deposit (ten cents a bottle for 16 oz. and smaller, twenty cents for quarts. This was the ’80s price- in the ’60s, the deposit was three cents/bottle.) My folks always got the returnable glass bottles. They were the least expensive way to get the sodas. Some single-use glass bottles crept in in the ’60s and ’70s and of course there were cans which weren’t reused. Plastic bottles were introduced with 2 L bottles, which they marketed as being a bit larger than two quarts, but at the price of two quarts. Other sizes followed later. As others have said, the companies quit reusing bottles when the one-way bottles became more profitable.
I looked into this a while back and found the answer for Mexico at least: beverages in non-refillable bottles are taxed at a much higher rate than refillable ones.
In Mexico this ends up helping the large national and multinational companies that have local delivery and recovery infrastructure everywhere, such as Modelo or Coca Cola, and hurting smaller companies that have to send product over long distances and can’t pick up their bottles.
I would think that places like Germany that have more refillable bottles have some kind of policy preference in place that favors local breweries that can handle local pickup, which would have the benefit of favoring local production over imports. This may also explain the very high deposit on aluminum cans there, as most local breweries don’t use it.
As many people have noted, recycling, as opposed to refilling, is in place pretty much everywhere to different extents. In some places it even makes economic sense to recycle without a deposit.
Fun fact some of us environmentalists think that recycling is the worst thing to happen to the environment for exactly the reason they don’t: consumers choose the convenience of single serving plastic bottles when coupled with the illusion that they will be recycled. However, according to the American Petroleum Institute, in whose best interest it would be to have this number as high as possible, only 5% of all plastic actually is. Meanwhile, plastic production is now 500% what it was in the 90s. All because consumers now tell themselves that individual plastic bottles are okay.
The onion did a headline once that read “Recycling does nothing for the environment, alleviates American guilt by 70%.” And this is unfortunately highly accurate.
(Some recycling – such as aluminum and steel – is quite efficient and hugely positive. However, that kind of recycling was ALWAYS done because it is cheaper than manufacture of the metal and metal alloys themselves.)
Final point: reduce, reuse, recycle was meant to be an order of operations with recycling on the bottom. The exact shift youve identified away from both reduction and reuse towards …recycling (?can 5% be called recycling?) is the problem.
I worked for a bottling company (Coke) at the end of the “return for deposit” era. It was a mess and cost a lot of money to handle all those dirty recycled coke bottles. Both at the distributer and at the grocery store that had to take them back.
The Corning Glass company made a very big deal about their “non returnable/ please recycle” thin glass bottles for soda. Then Plastic blow bottles came in.
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