this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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The cleaning was common back then. Every store took back the tall glass bottles of soda and in modern times oberweiss brought that back with milk. The glass melting is nice just as a final option really.
That's reuse, not recycling. Glass is much more suitable for reuse than plastics as it's longer-lasting and can withstand temperatures hot enough and cleaning agents strong enough to ensure it's food-safe after being collected, but you need quite a bit of infrastructure to get the bottles back to the company whose products they're for. At least for the parts of a bottle's life that the manufacturer's responsible for, it can be much cheaper to make fresh plastic, and if they can externalise the environmental cost of disposing of a plastic bottle (i.e. blame the consumer), it can look better for their carbon footprint etc., too.
yeah I was not limiting my comment to recycling just about how we don't really need to be using plastic everywhere and how things were pretty fine in the 70's where you only saw plastic in a few use cases.