Is it a major loss in profit or do current bottles make it impossible?
In: 5764
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 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
Several small independent dairies do.
But glass is expensive and energy-intensive to transport.
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.
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
Pretty common here in The Philippines were you leave a deposit for the bottle, then get the deposit back after you return it.
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.
Latest Answers