Why do glass bottles have to be “recycled”?

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Why can’t companies just sanitize and refill them?

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21 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Some do – beer bottles for instance are reused that way. But there are a lot of those. For the most part, there are small numbers of a lot of different bottles scattered across the country, and collecting, sorting, and then returning those to the specific places that use them is not economically viable. Easier and cheaper to melt them down and make new stuff.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You also have to consider how many of them end up broken before they get back to an actual recycling place (or the manufacturer if you want to insist on reusing them). You can’t do anything with a broken bottle besides melt it down and start over.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They can be but it only works at a local scale. In college, the store near my house sold milk and juice in heavy glass bottles that you could return to the store. There was a deposit of 50 cents on each bottle to encourage returns. The local dairy would pick up the empties when they delivered new milk, wash them, and refill them.

In order to be reusable, a glass bottle has to be thick enough to survive being banged around with other bottles and heat sterilized many times, so they’re pretty heavy. If the manufacturer is shipping their products long-distance, the cost of collecting empties, cleaning them, and shipping the heavier bottles both directions is a lot more than the cost of buying new bottles. There are very few small, local producers of milk, juice, and other beverages (except micro-breweries) these days so products have to be shipped a long way.

Most beer bottles and other glass containers are currently made to survive just one trip from the factory to your house and they’re as thin and light as possible without being too easy to break. As a homebrewer, I have to be careful which bottles I use because the really thin bottles can explode if the pressure inside is too high.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They can and some do. They usually only recycle the ones that have defects, or the ones with different shape than what they need.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Bottles have to be made strong enough to survive the turbulence of the distribution process. Advanced technology has created incredibly strong bottles, but efficiency dictates that you can’t make them so strong that they will cost more to make. So they do their job, but often lose their strength getting knocked around from the factory to the consumer. Figuring out which bottles retain their strength for another go and which ones have weakened adds a variable to the process that can be eliminated by recycling them to molten glass, repouring and maintaining quality control.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I’m not sure about most countries, and this may be outdated inforemation, but in India they do this with soft drink bottles. There are even places where if you want to enjoy a nice sprite, you have to drink it at the place you bought it so they can take the bottles back right away and they wash and refill on the spot. Over time, the bottles might break or get stolen so there are different eras of logos on bottles. You can probably find bottles with logos from the 80s and see how bottle shapes changed over time.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They can but for all but the smallest operations it’s usually not worth it.

A factor to consider is space.

Empty bottles still occupy a bottle’s worth of volume. A bunch of bottles in a bag or box further take up space because they don’t fit evenly together.

Hence the difficulty of the scheme in Seinfeld to bring deposit bottles and cans from New York to Michigan to take arbitrage advantage of Michigan’s ten cent deposit (vs NY’s five cent); the only way they could make it profitable was if Newman got his hands on a mostly empty mail truck and did it under the cover of a normal mail run.

There are ways to minimize that volume logistically, but the simplest and most effective way on any kind of large scale is to smash the bottles to compress the volume the constituent glass would take up.

That being said, the milk delivery process of yore used* to be exactly this. You got fresh milk from the dairy in glass bottles, and you’d leave your empties on the porch or in the box for the milkman to retrieve and bring back to the dairy on his run.

*Well, still is. It’s just not as common as it used to be, but many smaller dairies still do home delivery of milk and milk products the way they used to.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because the $ for coordination to get the right ones to the right place isn’t worth the effort.

Anonymous 0 Comments

When I was a child, we did this here in the States. Your “pop bottles” were all returnable/refundable. You would buy a six-pack of Pepsi or Mountain Dew or whatever your soft drink of choice was and then drink them. The empty bottles were put back into the six pack flat and returned to the grocery store where you would get a nickel back for each one (some states gave more, and those were usually listed on the top of the bottle). The bottling company would pick them up, sanitize and refill them at their plant. We did this all the time. I had an uncle who would go along the road side and collect unbroken refundable bottles for spare change (he was just a kid at the time, too).

I seem to recall this phasing out sometime in the early to mid-80s with the onset of plastic bottles and aluminum cans becoming more popular. I’d say storing bottles for this purpose takes up a lot of real estate and probably isn’t as efficient as just manufacturing new plastic bottles and aluminum cans.

Good memories, though….

Anonymous 0 Comments

This used to be the model – there were local bottling businesses everywhere. Deposit bottles would be collected, cleaned and reused. But there were many, many fewer brands and sizes of soda to deal with. And the deposits on the bottles used to be a much larger portion of the price of a bottle of soda, making them more valuable.