Is it a major loss in profit or do current bottles make it impossible?
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In Oregon they recently brought back the returnable/reusable bottle but it’s limited to uses where the logistics make it economical. For example, limited regional distribution to certain high volume accounts like chains. When the program started the bottles were trucked to Wyoming for washing but I think the plant is running in the Portland area now.
As a homebrewer I still use returnable 25 oz 7Up bottles from the ’60s. Those bottles will outlive me.
When I was a kid, soda bottles were currency that you could buy stuff with. Then the companies stopped reusing bottles and switched to recycling. End of an era.
There’s a local-ish dairy here that does reuse them. You pay a deposit on the bottle and return it to the store to get that money back. It works out OK, but even without taking the bottle deposit into consideration their milk costs 2x as much as the next most expensive brand on the shelf.
Glass bottles are absolutely washed and reused, plastic bottles are recycled in other ways. Plenty of counties have deposit systems where you pay like 10 cents extra per bottle / can. Then you get your deposit back when you hand it in for recycling.
A lot of microbreweries do with growlers. Other countries, like Germany, and states, like Michigan, have a tax on bottles that you can get back if you recycle them in the designated area
Delivered, reused milk bottles were a product of small local dairies. They could count on bottles being returned because houses had standing orders/relationships with the local dairy. No one was trucking bottles across the state. Milk is notorious for going bad quickly. Bottles stayed in the local community.
Compare that with today, most people don’t have ongoing relationships with people you buy beverages from. Even with major breweries in every city, microbrews everywhere, everything travels much farther and is much more distributed.
In Switzerland, plastic bottles, I.e. PET bottles, are recycled into new bottles. It’s a closed cycle with huge benefits.
https://www.petrecycling.ch/de/home
Some numbers:
34 million liters of petroleum oil reduction
126000 tonnes of greenhouse gas reduction
And that’s from a small country with only 8.x million habitants. Like a tad more than 2% from the US population.
So you could reduce oil and greenhouse gas emissions by almost 50 times that for the US.
That’s over 1.5 billion liters of oil and over 50’000’000 tonnes of greenhouse gases.
Seriously, this should be mandatory world wide.
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.
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.
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