I am sitting here at work (not working obviously) and drinking a Coca Cola Zero. This tasty beverage has something that I have noticed is on the side of all plastic bottles of sodas:
NO REFILL :dubious:
Well duh. Is this some old regulation that doesn’t mean anything anymore? I would really like to know because if I can buy some bottle that they still actually refill, I just might do that. 
It just means the company won’t take it back and refill it. Throw it out or do whatever you want with it. Apparently, at one time, you could return soda bottles for money.
That time of course being as recent as the 1980s.
And there is a dairy in my area that sells milk in glass bottles that they charge deposits for and will refill. The bottle deposit is a lot now, around a buck.
In the “old days”, most bottle deposits were $0.10.
Okay I follow you now.
I know if you by any glass bottled Dr. Pepper bottle, they still have 10 cent deposit deals on the side of the bottles for states like MI.
Thats what that means. Cool, thanks.
Glass or plastic?
I’m in BC, and all our pop cans and bottles, and other cans and bottles, go back to for deposit return and recycling.
Recycling is not the same as refilling.
In the “olden days” when all soda bottles were glass, the grocery stores and other places that sold sodas kept the wooden crates that came with a case of 24 bottles in the back room.
Customers would bring back the empties for the deposit, which the merchant then stored in the back room, sorted according to the bottling company. When the driver made his delivery, he would take the empties back to the bottling company, where they would be washed and re-used.
These are different. Many states also have this requirement, and the basic idea is to increase the price of the soda/beer/whatever by N cents, and then if you turn the bottle/can in for recycling you get that N cents back.
But in previous years soda makers would take back the bottles themselves, sterilize and refill them.
In one case they were simply reusing bottles, now the states/provinces are simply trying to provide an incentive to recycle.
The bottlers would be happy to have no returns for any reason. Costs money to handle scrap plastic.
Some states have anti-littering laws requiring a deposit on bottles to reduce costs of state litter collecting operations.
This is still done in many parts of Europe. Most single-serving bottles of pop are glass. There is a deposit of 10 or 15 cents which is refunded when you return the bottle to the place of purchase; the glass bottles are then returned to the bottler to be cleaned and refilled. Sometimes single-serving drinks are sold in plastic bottles, Tetra-Paks, or other containers, which do not have a deposit, but you are encouraged to throw the empty bottles in a recycling bin rather than a garbage can. I presume the bottles are then recycled rather than refilled.
The situation with large 1.5- and 2-litre bottles is different. These are invariably made of thick plastic (much thicker than their North American counterparts), have a deposit, and are refilled rather than recycled. I get the feeling that some bottlers don’t do a very good job of cleaning the used bottles before refilling them, as the Coca-Cola sometimes tastes a bit off.
This is still done in the UK with glass bottles of IRN BRU and other Barr products. The bottles needn’t be returned to the place of purchase; any store that sells Barr products will take them (although sometimes grudgingly).
Most German supermarkets have machines that handle bottle returns. There are two slots into which you can place one bottle each; you then close a door and the machine pushes the bottles into an internal compartment and credits you for the deposit. Once you’re done returning your bottles, you press a button and a receipt is printed out which you take to the cashier to get your money back.
The funny thing is that somehow the machines know where the bottles come from, and refuse to accept bottles from other supermarkets. They can also distinguish between dozens of different kinds of bottles (big and small Coke bottles, water bottles, yogurt jars, etc.) and credit you the appropriate amount for each.
In Washington, DC, it was proved (to the voters, at least) that an anti-littering deposit system is racially biased. :rolleyes: Yes, that’s the arguement that derailed it. So we still have a city with tons of litter all over, giving no incentive to pick up the trash.
Probably up until about 1980, my dad would by Coke in a quart glass bottle and keep the fizz in with a rubber clamping stopper. He madevery sure to get his money back by returning the bottle to be washed and refilled.
Here’s a topic that I happen to know a little about. I wrote a paper on the economics of PET-recycling a couple of years ago.
There’s a bar code scanner inside. At least that’s the case in Sweden. Here only bottles that are registered in the deposit-refund system give you any money back.
The more advanced types of machines have both a bar code scanner as well as measuring systems to check that the bottles are of the right size. There has been cases where enterprising persons have tried to fool the system by printing out bar codes and stucking them to any old bottle to get money.
We have two variants of plastic bottles that are recycled. There’s is the thicker one which gets washed and refilled (around 20 times before it is too worn). The second type is thinner and is not refilled.
Both types of bottles are made of the same type of plastic , Polyethylenetherephthalate (I probably got the spelling wrong) commonly known as PET.
When the thicker bottles get worn out they and the other bottles go to plastic recycling and are ground down. Only parts of the material go back to new PET bottles though since virgin PET is preferred at least on the part of the bottle that is in contact with the soda. The rest of the material goes to other uses.
PET also burns quite nicely (creating mostly water and carbon dioxide) so it can incinerated and used to generate energy.
If you’re in the mood to get some soda or beer in a refillable bottle, head to Prince Edward island (Canada’s smallest province.) By law, beer and soft drinks must be sold in refillable containers there.
<confused youngster>
So, you go out and buy a (glass) bottle of Coke. You drink it. Then, if you want ten cents back, you need to go back to the store, and return the bottle. They give you your dime, then, presumably, refill the bottle of coke, put a new lid on it, and sell it again.
Why? I’m really, really hoping that they truly sterilized all the returned bottles - I’d assume in an autoclave, which I think would also require heat-resistant glass, wouldn’t it? I can’t see how that would be more cost-effective for the company. (And also: that’s absolutely disgusting - why would you want to even risk drinking out of the same bottle as someone else had? Ew.)
</confused youngster>
You go to restaurants, right? Those aren’t new cups they are giving you. The bottles are cleaned and sterilized just like anything else is- hot water, disinfectant, and some steam. Sterilization is part of the bottling process anyway.
Waste from bottles is a major problem in the world- especially in areas where the water is undrinkable and bottled water is an everyday thing. Tons of garbage is created every eyar from perfectly reuseable one-use items like this. There is no reason for it.
And even when you get a shiny new bottle it is probably made of recycled glass/plastic/aluminum. Whats worse is that before it came to you, all that material was laying around in the stinky dirty ground. All that insisting on a fresh bottle will do is waste more resources and cost more money.