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by NeedMoreTea
2583 days ago
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It may be more simple than you think. Plastic bottles take a surprising amount of energy - higher than reusing glass - to recycle as the washing has steam cleaning and agitating stages because you need to remove the ink, glue and labels from the outside. Plastic recycling is comically easy to ruin a whole batch by small amounts of contaminants that didn't get cleaned away. Glass is often recycled not to glass again, but ground to become low grade building sand. From an energy point of view it seems designed not to pay. The old milkman, or Corona pop man in the UK got about 50 round trips from each bottle. Any breakages were thrown in with the new glass. |
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A commercial relationship like that is at the very best case for bottle returns, though. I think bottle reuse in Norway when glass was phased out was in the high teens.