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

We still have returnable, reusable milk bottle here. I hate plastic, so we only buy these and return them when empty to be reused.

Anonymous 0 Comments

In Brazil, they recycled glass soda bottles for years. Growing up, sometimes you’d find a really old bottle, all scuffed up, like it was frosted glass.

A great Brazilian artist, Cildo Meireles took advantage of the recirculation of bottles to [print political messages](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fi0.wp.com%2Fbeachpackagingdesign.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2Fboxvox%2F6a00e54f0014bd883401347fa59e42970c.jpg&f=1&nofb=1) and get around the censors.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I homebrew from time to time and I reuse beer bottles often, but it’s not on a large enough scale to make a real difference

Anonymous 0 Comments

As with all these big-brand questions, the answer is always the same: Because money. The technology obviously isn’t the issue, the companies simply need monetary incentives to do so.

I bet adding a 1$ tax on every non-reusable bottle would solve the problem more or less over night.

Anonymous 0 Comments

In the United States, the answer is because of ‘liability’ or lawyers.

The problem is that one or two people are going to take their glass coke bottles, and use them to store paint thinner, or something stupid and toxic. Then, those people will return the bottles decades later, they get refilled, and then they poison the people who end up drinking from those refilled bottles.

It costs more money to clean the incoming bottles in such a manner as to guarantee that they are safe, than it costs to make new bottles, so companies make new bottles instead of risking reusing a bottle that leads to a lawsuit.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It takes a lot of labor to sort out the bottles and get them back to their correct destinations. In first world countries, labor is expensive and glass is cheap.

Anonymous 0 Comments

From what I understand they mainly don’t get recycled because the materials needed to make glass are everywhere so it is cheaper to gather them than make new bottles out of old ones.

Anonymous 0 Comments

“Why can’t companies do X” is a very, very loaded question. Most often the reason is “money” and that is just not satisfying. It is, however, very applicable to this particular question.

The real answer is that it costs way more money to deal with a product’s entire lifecycle , than it does to just make a thing and let someone else deal with it afterwards. Glass bottles were designed to be reused over and over again, because it was cheaper than buying new glass bottles every time. They calculated how many times a bottle could be reused, worked that into the overall cost of the product, and the industry was set up around that. And if the bottle could not be reused, they were gathered up and sent back to where ‘cullet’ (industry term for broken glass) to be mixed in to the new glass. Recycling glass is actually a very important part of glass work, so there was a potential for profit to be made there. And, as such, there is an entire industry of glass recycling all over every country in the world.

Plastic bottles, however, are ‘disposable’ and are (usually) not meant to be reused directly after being emptied. That ‘disposable’ aspect means that in the eyes of the corporation/manufacturer, once they sell it to you it is no longer their problem. It is your problem to find out how to deal with it. To the corporation, this is fantastic news because a huge and expensive part of their business is no longer required. And, the ‘recycling’ aspect of Plastic was, sadly, not true. So it is not profitable to recycle plastic, and now that is a huge problem.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It used to be common in the US for bottles to be cleaned and reused, but wider distribution networks and greater diversity of bottle types made that less and less cost effective as time went on.

There’s a big difference between a milk courier delivering milk and picking up empties to bring back to the dairy, and a supermarket that sells 300 kinds of bottled and jarred beverages needing to sort and store all those different types of containers.

Also, glass is one of the easiest and cheapest materials to recycle; that also helped push the financial tipping point.

Anonymous 0 Comments

>Why can’t companies just sanitize and refill them?

What makes you think they don’t? What do you think happens when you take your empties back to the beer store?

I swear, 90% of all ELI5 posts stem from false premises.