returnable-bottles
Photo credit: ThisIsIt2

Plasticless got its start when I was living on the tiny Mediterranean island of Gozo. Gozo and much of the rest of Malta felt like Canada did in the 70s. One aspect of daily life that added to that effect was the returnable bottle system that was still the default for soft drinks. I took a picture of one of the thick green bottles that had some extreme wear rings. It must have been reused hundreds of times. I think the picture is on the hard drive of a computer that I left in Malta. Here is a picture that illustrates what I am talking about, except with a beer bottle.

I was quite upset when the EU forced Malta to switch to plastic bottles. It was a directive related to competition, not the environment. The change had to take place even before the country had a recycling scheme in place for the plastic bottles.

I recently noticed that my kids were buying the occasional plastic bottle of Coca-Cola. I had a few things to say about that, but I have to hold myself to allowing them to use their own discretion with their small weekly allowance. Actually, I make a fairly frequent argument against buying soft drinks. I do not purchase family sized bottles of soft drinks for consumption at home. I buy Coke and other drinks for the family to accompany some restaurant meals.

Anyway… I stopped in at the store where the kids go to blow their allowance and I noticed that there are returnable bottles in the store. It’s not a fancy store and they leave the glass bottles in the plastic delivery cases rather than putting them in the small display cooler with the plastic bottles. I plan to do a price comparison and then offer some further advice to the kids.

The returnable soft drink bottle is an endangered species in the United States. I have written emails to a handful of niche bottlers and I am still waiting to hear back from them. I found an old article about the demise imminent demise of returnable Pepsi bottles.

A Japanese company that makes some nasty kind of hard liquor has a very well written explanation of their environmentally responsible delivery systems. Returnable bottles are actually their second choice. They use 4 R’s instead of three at this forward thinking company, placing REFUSE ahead of reduce, reuse and recycle. By refuse, they mean that they require the consumer to bring their own container to a distributor.

In the modern age, we use energy and resources to reduce effort and work, which is generally called efficiency. Directly opposing this approach, bulk sales are a retail method that increases effort and work to reduce resource and energy consumption.

I think some business models could easily offload the job of drink containment onto the consumer, but I like the idea of returnable bottles as long as the logistics are designed to minimize the resources expended on transportation and processing.

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