Why can’t companies just sanitize and refill them?
In: Other
“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.
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