"Tim Southerwood" wrote in message
...
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.

Its practicality.. who is going to sort all the different shapes and sizes,
pack them up, store them until there is enough to ship, etc.
It worked with milk because there was a milk bottle, not 400 different
shaped milk bottles.. so sometimes it said express dairies and sometimes
asda but who cared. It is the marketers that make reuse difficult in their
attempt to make brand image.. nothing will change until they are
sacked/re-trained.


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.

That would be true for plastics. Maybe if they put different fluorescent
dyes in plastic a machine could grind plastic up and separate the types
using air jets?

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.

Ah yes.. just put a pint of bleach in this pop bottle for me please.

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.

Impetus starts at zero. Where would we be if Fleming had said that?.. hang
on he did say that.


No glass needs to be melted,

Some would, because of breakages.

Of course. But I would expect a low percentage.

It needs to be a high enough percentage to keep the glass production going..
it take far less energy to make glass if some of it is recycled than if none
is.


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.

Well they could start by not shipping bottled water about.. it isn't better
than tap water and pollutes like hell.
Then there are other minor things like dumping cosmetics and jewelry as both
kill and pollute for nothing.


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.

The greet argument is fine.. the reasons for doing it are a bit dodgy if
global warming is the reason.

Cheers

Tim