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