Some months ago I found that my plastic recycling tub had been smashed due to UV exposure and rough handling by the boyos on the local Council's collection truck. So I rang the Council to get a new one. In passing I asked, "What should I do with the old one, is it recyclable?"

To which the answer was, "Well theoretically yes," (it's stamped *Recycle 5*). "But we won't collect the old ones because they're too big."

The advice was to cut it up and send it to landfill...
;-)

I always wondered why one would recycle bottles (such as the ubiquitious standard beer bottle) when one wash them and refill them. Does anyone understand the economicS?

It is difficult to ensure that all foreign objects (cigarette ends, nails, insect bodies, mould, chemical residues etc) are removed on the wash line well enough to give you a food grade container, for this reason glass is often downcycled into things like road paving aggregate, or fiberglass insulation.

It's somewhat as John Milton said.

If you wash them, it uses a lot of water and energy, and you need some good quality control to make sure nothing's left.

If you smash them up and melt them, it uses no water but a lot of energy, and you can then safely reuse them, any crap left in them will just burn up at glass-melting temperatures.

Also, each company produces or orders its own kind of bottles or jars. For example the Monbulk jam jar is a different shape to the Homebrand jam jar. That means if they wanted to reuse rather than recycle, they'd have to sort out all the different jars and bottles. Easier just to smash them up, melt them down and reshape them.

Of course if we had just a dozen different standard sizes and shapes then it'd be easier to sort and thus reuse them, but there you go. All along the chain of production-use-disposal there are opportunities to step in to make reduce, reuse or recycle easier; at the moment we choose to only step in at the end. That's why we have recycling instead of reusing, and downcycling instead of recycling.

If we stepped in at the beginning of the production-use-disposal chain it'd be easier overall, but then you have to argue with and regulate a zillion different companies who will argue a moral right to have a slightly different-shaped bottle, and so on.

Back in the early 70’s one of the topics in my studies was Life Cycle Energy Analysis (LCEA). One case study was on Milk Bottles which at the time in the UK were all made of glass and doorstep delivered early each morning with the Milkman taking away the empties.

At that time it was estimated that each bottle had a life of 12-14 deliveries before it had to be sent for recycling. Repeated mechanised handling and washing took the shine of the bottle making people think it was dirty, so time to melt it down.

Hard to remember when the majority of milk bottles being glass and delivered daily ended but something to do with the rise of cheap fridges, the supermarket and imports of EU milk in cartons.

I was in London (50 / 60’s) so our Milk Floats were all electric driven, big batteries recharged at the distribution depot. As the deliveries were made very early in the morning that was a great benefit due to their being relatively silent, although the bottles bashing about still woke people up. An added benefit of the early mornings for those of us who needed the pocket money was that we could help the Milky and still get to school on time.

In norway all beer and most soda bottles are washed and refilled that way, both glass and plastic. All beer bottles are the exact same shape no matter what brewery it is from, but for soda there are a couple of varieties, one for Coca Cola and one for everyone else I think. The last 5-10 years more and more thin-walled single use bottles have appeared, but most is still for reuse. I don't know how many times a typical bottle gets reused, but occasionally you get one that has deep scourmarks in the glass all around it, presumably from interaction with other bottles and metal parts at the fillingstation.

Regarding economics, it is my understanding that this scheme would not be economical without the tax placed on single use bottles. There was talk about removing said tax a few years ago, but it didn't happen. Lately it has become common to buy beer and soda in cans aswell, something you hardly ever saw just a few years ago. That's because the tax on single use bottles depends on the degree of recycling. The higher the ratio between bottles sold and bottles returned, the lower the tax.

Well, in principle all plastics are recyclable, whatever they are. It's just that some take a lot of energy, water, labour and time to recycle, and others not so much.

It's just that some processes aren't carried out because we don't think it's worth the trouble.

In the Third World, already people are mining landfills for their materials.

And in some countries, the stuff doesn't even make it to landfills. When labour is expensive and resources are cheap, we have landfills; when labour is cheap and resources are expensive, we have this guy:

There is perhaps a happy middle ground between New York's Fresh Kills landfill, and this poor bloke dragging those bottles along. We can seek that - maybe something to write to your MP about.