Mary Fisher coughed up some electrons that declared:


"Tim Southerwood" wrote in message
...
I know what the future is: returnable glass bottles with a deposit.
It worked in 1970 and it can work now, if someone can kick the industry
up the backside to (re)organise it.

You must be very young, we were doing that in the 1940s, and probably
since stoneware bottles were used come to think of it.

Indeed.


There is no reason a well made glass bottle needs to be considered single
use.

Indeed there isn't, but I suspect that most shoppers wouldn't choose to
have a scratched wine bottle. You can't help scratches on glass over
several uses.

That's a possible concern, but I don't remember any issues with Corona pop
bottles (which are the ones I remember with a 10p deposit). Nor milk bottle
for that matter.

Think about it:

Retailer sells bottle plus product.

Customer consumes product.

a) Customer returns bottle on next visit (they almost do this now, with
many
glass recycling facilities being located in supermarket car parks)

Yebbut in your case, to reclaim the deposit, more staff or time would be
needed. I'm not saying it's a bad scheme, just that I doubt it would work
as well as you and I would like.

It may be a shift of labour. I heard of recycling plants where hand labour
is needed to sort recycables, so in the grand scheme of things it may not
make much difference. A more radical, and even more old fashioned idea
might be to sell liquid products on-tap and the customer brings their own
recepticle. Probably to inconvenient for most people with their hectic
lives thought.



I honestly don't know what's so difficult about that, apart from someone
actually needs to organise it.

How about volunteering?

No point. There is nothing I could do. This needs the impetus and might of
central government. It's what they *should* be doing for the money I pay
them, instead of buggering around with irrelevant and unpopular crap like
Part P, ID cards and wars in countries which are none of our concern.

No glass needs to be melted,

Some would, because of breakages.

Of course. But I would expect a low percentage.

major legs of the return transport are just
using spare capacity. Very energy efficient I would have though.

More energy efficient to use lightweight plastic bottles, the weight of
glass is responsible for a lot of fossil fuel use.

This is a reasonable argument on the face of it, but what if you factor in
the cost of production of said plastic, including the fact that it requires
oil which is a finite resource and possibly better used for other things
(like lubrication products). I'm not convinced though, that the extra
percentage of fuel used to transport the weight of glass over plastic is
that significant, given the weight of the bottle is a small ratio of the
total weight of bottle plus product.

It is difficult to evaluate without studying all the costs involved, which
is why I keep an open mind rather than taking the green argument as gospel.

Cheers

Tim