h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Back again after one of my intermittent lacunae, it occurs to me ask again the question that I first posted a couple of years ago - namely' 'why do we not return bottles anymore?'

Years ago all your soft drinks and a lot of your beer bottles were returnable. Now none of them are. They all go to recycling. What's the twist? Surely reuse is economically and envirimentally better - or is it?

Yes, that should read environmentally. Every time I come back here I seem to be on a new device...

Recycling has become a huge industry. Maybe the economics of scale makes recycling a better bet than returning bottles/cans. I just don't know. It puts the burden of retrieval and transportation in the lap of municipal governments, which send out trucks to pick up recyclable stuff. Consumers don't have to go back to the stores to return bottles/cans, and the stores don't have to figure out where to send the bottles/cans. If municipal governments have figured out ways to increase revenue by selling what they've collected, then that seems to benefit society....doesn'tit?

Re-use has its own issues; particularly for food and drink.
How can you prove that the returned empty bottle or whatever has not been used to contain something nasty while it was out in the world?
How can you gaurentee that your cleaning process has removed all possible contaminents prior to re-filling?

The answer seems to be that it is too expensive to do the neccessary cleaning and testing to prove it. Therefore it is cheaper for the food and drink manufacturers (and there insurers) to avoid the problem by sending all the empties to recycling and have them melted down and re-cast before using them again.