Soda came in a glass bottle for the first 20 years of my life. A small Depot was charged and bottles were returned to the grocery store. The deposit was refunded to the customer.
The bottler collected & washed/sanitized the bottles. They were reused many times until they chipped or broke. Some arssholes would toss the bottles along the road. But others like my grandmother and I collected them and turned in for the deposit. A nice source of revenue.
The system worked well. My first job was at a grocery and I’ve helped unload the bottles from the bin in front of the store. We emptied it and moved them to the back for pickup by the bottler.
Resuming this successful program would eliminate a major source of plastic that goes into landfills.
China isn’t accepting recyclables anymore and cities like Philadelphia are incinerating them.
(watch the discussion on recyclables)
It would also return an income stream to enterprising young kids…and perhaps to buskers willing to play for the cost of cheap wine. According to the Sages, though, it did not seem to increase attendance at funerals…
Many state already have bottle laws requiring a deposit, but the soft drink industry is dead set against them even for plastic bottles. There is no way they’d allow a glass bottle recycling bill to become law, since they would have to buy equipment to sterilize the bottles for reuse.
If the companies thought this still made sense, they would do it. You thought it was “successful,” but they stopped it for a reason. Are you advocating the government force this on them? I believe the bottle deposit laws in some states are designed for a similar purpose. The industry fights against such efforts, so I assume they don’t like the idea.
Does anyone remember how the Soda companies got away with ending reusable glass bottles?
Were laws changed in every state? I seem to remember the deposit varied from state to state. IIRC a nickel was common when the program ended. Today they’d probably charge 20 cents a bottle.
Soda is such a huge source of plastic and it actually doesn’t recycle well. Especially since China is no longer accepting most of it.
***Update this wasn’t a voluntary program? I can’t imagine bottlers doing this on their own. There must of been a law. I remember the deposit was printed on the bottle and a list of applicable states.
If it was voluntary then they deserved a huge thank you.
I voted ‘Other’. In Denmark we pay a deposit on many kinds of bottles and cans. It works fine. The plastic and aluminum containers are crushed and baled and the materials are recycled.
In other words, if you use recyclable materials for the bottles, the materials can be recycled even if the bottle can’t. The same benefit for landfills and nature and kids collecting bottles.
Most or many states already have a return deposit. I am in Oregon where it is 10 cents on cans, plastic, or glass. This gives manufactures an incentive to make their containers recyclable. It has been expanded to cover even my plastic ice tea containers.
There is an economic and environmental cost to returning to glass that you may not have considered, and that is the weight to transport. All these glass containers are heavy. To transport a truckload of full bottles means that you can haul fewer bottles of soda and need more trucks to move the same amount. And if you are going to refill them for a second or third use, that transport of the empties costs much more, because of the volume involved, than crunching down the plastic or aluminum into manageable bales. Extra trucking, extra fuel, more CO2, more environmental impact.
I am not going to try to crunch the numbers, although somebody probably has, but I guess that the net environmental, climate, fuel, costs of moving all this heavy glass around has a bad impact.
And then there is all that broken glass and old containers which really isn’t as permanently recyclable as you might think.
Oregon has the oldest bottle deposit law in the country. You take the empties back to a store that has a machine, insert them, the UPC gets scanned, you get your deposit back.
Note that aluminum cans and plastic soda bottles are notably recyclable. In our state the local carpet industry wanted the state legislature to enact a deposit law since the soda bottles are great feed for their plants. Didn’t pass of course, since, you know, recycling.
Problems:
The return machines are hogged by homeless people returning hundreds of empties at a time. This creates a feedback loop. A lot of people don’t want to waste their time standing near homeless folk so they toss them. The homeless people sift thru waste bins for them, increasing the number they are returning.
Some places only accept the empties they sell. There’s a store code on them. Complicates things tremendously.
A little bit of change to the law and much of this can be fixed.
If you’re going to force deposits, forget glass. Just do deposits.
The question is, is reusing the containers, as the OP describes, more efficient or environmentally friendly than recycling the material (plastic or aluminum or whatever) that they’re made from?
Yes. I expect which sizes are available will vary by market, but in Spain at least there are sizes which match the old ones; in fact, some of those can be had in both glass and plastic (glass is supposed to be restaurants only, and conversely the soda brands didn’t want to see cans or plastic in restaurants - didn’t work).
well, you’re thinking “closed loop.” e.g. plant fills bottle, person drinks contents, returns bottle, bottle goes back for refill.
IIRC most of the aluminum cans (and all plastic bottles) are “open loop.” i.e. aluminum cans are cleaned, shredded, and sent to foundries to be melted down, re-alloyed, and cast into ingots. Those Coke cans you bring back to the store could easily end up as an F-150 hood as they could new beverage cans. Aluminum is such a pain in the ass to refine from ore, reclaiming aluminum metal from scrap is far more economical.
plastic bottles can’t be re-used for food use (can’t sterilize them easily,) so they get shredded, melted, and turned into other things.
I don’t think it would work if it was voluntary. Given a choice, most people would just buy sodas that don’t charge a deposit and are therefore cheaper. The companies that voluntarily had deposits would lose business.
The only way deposits work is if every company is required to do it and they compete on a level playing field.
I want to be clear, because I quoted an option I didn’t choose and I started my reply with ‘no’, which may lead people to believe I don’t think there should be a deposit.
I voted for Yes, I prefer glass and I support charging a deposit.
California passed the Beverage Container Recycling and Litter Reduction Act in 1986. I’ve been living in Washington since almost 2004, but to this day I can’t see a Honda CR-V without thinking of ‘California Refund Value’.
When I was a kid, sharp broken glass was EVERYWHERE. In the gutters. On the sidewalk. All over picnic tables In the woods. People in general are better about not littering these days, but glass is heavy and easily broken and complicated to remove.
