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