You obviously didn’t grow up in St. Louis, where you could buyquart bottles of Vess and Whistle sodas at your local supermarket.
Why is beer not in plastic bottles?
There are some brands of pop still sold in glass bottles. Like IBC Root Beer, for example. (Love that stuff)
Here in the Yucatán, Coke has half liter returnable glass bottles. Coke also has 1.5 and 2 liter heavy weight plastic returnables. To my knowledge no other soda manufacturer offers returnable bottles.
Beer stores sell 12 ounce and 1.2 liter returnable glass bottles.
There is no cash value for the returns. Unless you ask for a receipt for the deposit. This receipt is dated and expires within 1-2 days. And only valid at the store where it was purchased.
Single use plastic and aluminum cans are gathered and sold by the kilo to recycling merchants.
“Other”
I’m down for reducing plastic waste but glass isn’t the answer. Like Dallas Jones pointed out, it’s too heavy to ship without increasing a company’s carbon footprint, and the collection and re-shipping back to the bottler makes things even worse.
Now, switching to a fully-recycleable loop that includes alternative-fuel shipping, where a complete overhaul of their process includes glass but results in less fossil fuel and eliminates plastic waste? I’d totally buy the world a Coke in glass bottles!
It’s the contents of the bottle that is problematic. Bottles of diabetes are creating the obesity and medical cost issues that we’re experiencing today.
I worked in a Coca Cola bottling plant for a few months back in 1979. I started as part of the crew that sorted, cleaned, and inspected returned 8 and 12 ounce bottles. I was told back in the 60’s they use to handle up to 10,000 returned bottles a day, it was about 2000 a day when I was there. Depending on the days when glass bottles were filled, they could fill up to 30,000 of them. New bottles were filled first then the returned bottles were filled. This was because new bottles were much less likely to break on the filling line. From a cost stand point, new bottles cost at that time about 1.5 cents each, returns cost the company about 17 cents each per refill. My only regret now is not saving some of the vintage bottles that were returned. A couple of co-workers use to sell them at swap meets for 50 cents each, some are worth much much more now days, they are getting hard to find.
I had to vote ‘other’ because I don’t care about glass but I prefer the mandatory deposit. Actually I prefer cans 'cause they’re lighter and easier to carry and the local stores often run specials where the per case price is lower if you buy 3 or 4 cases at a time. (Cases being the 12 can boxes nowadays)
Here in Oregon, almost all of the stores that accept returns have machines, usually outside, that you have to feed the bottles and cans into. The last time* I returned glass bottles to one of those machines I could hear the glass being broken inside the machine as I fed each bottle in.
The point is, I don’t think the local bottling plants are refilling glass bottles any more. I think they’re being crushed for recycling anyway.
*Our local animal shelter recently started a program whereby you can donate large bags (they supply the bags) of cans and bottles that have a ‘deposit’ on them to the shelter and they recycle them and get the deposit money for them. It’s a good revenue stream for them and I don’t have to spend 30-45 minutes feeding containers into a balky machine. I don’t mind losing the $10 - $15 worth of deposit money when it’s going to the animal shelter.
No, because transportation cost.
In the early '70s Coke bottles were 16 oz. My dorm at MIT got deliveries direct from the Coke plant across the Charles. Deposits were 2 cents a bottle. When the plant went on strike and no one picked up the bottles a friend and I, discovering that deposits were 5 cents in New York, bought up every bottle in MIT, rented a truck, and drove them to New York. (He had to pay off people at the Coke plant on 34th Street - my friend later became a lawyer. 
)
I know Seinfeld did something like this, but when we did it there were no deposit laws. We had over 200 cases of bottles, and only broke less than half a dozen.
The Coke plant in NY was very impressive.
I think laws against plastic would be good, but aluminum cans are fine. Glass, Aluminum or returnable glass only. No more plastic.
Same with water.
Everyone keeps saying no to glass bottles citing transport and enviromental costs.
My Grandfather worked for the local Pepsi distributor for the first half of my life and I toured the plant many times while witnessing the shift from glass to plastic.
Here is what I remember about the shift. Not only transport and storage costs with the attendant enviromental impact, but the cost of the additional facility for inspecting sorting and cleaning the bottles, the complex machinery and the maintenance of that machinery, the thousands of gallons of water and all the energy needed to run the plant and needed to clean and sterilize the bottles. The economic and enviromental impact is huge and very much a disincentive for reusing glass bottles. Transportation costs for the additional weight of glass while significant is almost negligible comparison and losses due to breakage during transport and storage, while annoying are negligible in comparison.
You can have glass bottles without making them returnable, just make they recyclable, and get rid of plastic.
Transportation costs for glass are most highly cited because it’s a two way cost. Particularly the transport of empty bottles back to the bottler.
Some people (myself included) don’t like to keep bags of plastic bottles and cans, in or outside their homes. And these can be crushed to a fraction of their original size. Not everyone has recyclable trash pickup. If you’ve experienced having cases of bottles stacked up, it’s takes a lot of space and isn’t sanitary, mold and bugs.
Also, as stated, glass costs more to transport, takes more space on store shelves and more fragile (lost sales) which means higher cost to the consumer.
The contents of a glass bottle is cheap. What costs is moving the material around and melting/molding them. That’s a lot of energy which is likely to produce greenhouse gases. Glass is one of the least green recycling materials around.
Note that one downside of plastic bottles is keeping them separate in the waste stream. If you can sort out #2 plastic bottles easily then you can actually make money on them. That’s a win for plastics.
Glass needs to be sorted as well. So that’s a tie there.
But plastic is going to need a lot less energy to move around and melt/mold again and the material is more valuable. So plastic wins overall.
Think about that.
That’s fraught with peril, since not all glass bottles are clear. Brown and green bottles are “junk” glass, you can’t get rid of the color. Rather than trying to prevent cross contamination of colors it’s likely cheaper just to make new glass from raw materials. Especially since glass shatters easily and you’ll have bits of bottles mixed into everything.
Plus recycling glass is roughly as costly (in time and energy) than making new. Unlike aluminum which is far easier and cheaper to recycle scrap; refining aluminum from ore is energy intensive and uses nasty processes.
It’s fairly rare, but glass bottles, especially recycled bottles can explode, especially when subjected to excess heat or cold. I remember in the 60’s walking down the soda aisle and seeing the remains of a soda bottle on the shelf. They also explode on the bottling line, which means shutting down the line until the shards are completely cleaned up and in the trucks. Again major cleanup. You can’t deliver bottles that may have glass shards on them.
Also, even if just for nostalgia, most soda and some beer bottles have old fashioned crimped caps. Nothing like the feel of the bottle lip on your lips! Ohh…but they’re another failure point!
Here’s the Wiki for the landmark case of Escola v. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. where a bottle of Coke exploded in Escola’s hand. The ruling by the judge in the case is cited to be a part of current product liability laws.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escola_v._Coca-Cola_Bottling_Co.
A few months back I bought a glass bottle of Nehi Orange for novelty’s sake, not having had a drink from a glass bottle in who knows how many years. Aside from the drink being flat, the bottle broke within a few days of my having it (apparently from just being knocked over on its side.) The disposable bottles seem to be much thinner than the old returnables.
Yep, polyethylene can be used for so many things.
Yep. Some bottles have do Do Not Reuse printed on them.
This is one of the things that I wondered about the Pic-A-Pop we had back then. The bottles were lighter than the other non big three (Coke, Pepsi and 7-UP) bottles.