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Comment by Ayesh | Hacker News Reader

I love the pfand system we have in the Netherlands and Germany. I read that about 90% of the bottles and containers are returned because there is an immediate financial incentive to do so.

In Asia, plastic bags are given for free, and I'm sure charging a few cents would have made a massive difference. Uber Eats, GoFood, and Grab Food all have made some changes so you can mark if you do not want the plastic cutlery. There is a company in India, Zomato, that even sends recyclable bags along the food. All of these changes should be appreciated by both media and consumers.

Recycling would never solve the problem alone. It's an illusion of a solution. Using less and less plastic and more alternative material would.

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I love the pfand system we have in the Netherlands and Germany. I read that about 90% of the bottles and containers are returned because there is an immediate financial incentive to do so.

Add to that: Even if you can't be bothered to return a bottle for the Pfand you can just dump it in a visible place and it will be picked up in minutes and returned by somebody who needs the money more urgently than you.

What important is that the materials get recycled not that they get returned. Returning only addresses the eyesore of discarded packaging not environmental concerns.

It's even better than recycled, most bottle are simply cleaned and reused as is. You can tell because the side of beer bottles in germany are scratched on the top/bottom where they contact the other bottles during transport: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/55df3cede4b0daf4d...

Glass bottles get reused, plastic gets recycled. The first PET bottles were made to be reused as well, they were quite a bit more substantial than the current versions. This scheme was scrapped quite soon, probably because it ended up being more expensive to clean these plastic bottles and discard the ones which for some reason were not usable any more. This led to the development of the current one-time-use thin-walled PET bottle.

As to whether those wear marks on glass beer bottles are from them touching together during transport I'd suggest that this actually is not the case. They shouldn't come into contact with another, seeing as they are transported in crates with pockets for individual bottles. It is far more likely that those marks come from handling in the bottle washing-, filling- and labelling machines where the bottles gang and rub against each other. If you're from Germany you might have watched 'die Sendung mit der Maus' ('the program with the mouse', a long-running television program aimed at children which amongst others details all sorts of industrial processes) where this process is followed from start to finish. Here's an example from the '70s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7Bd6YWrfWw

> This led to the development of the current one-time-use thin-walled PET bottle.

I'm drinking from thick reusable/reused plastic bottle everyday here in Berlin, even coke is sold in them, they still exists

> it ended up being more expensive to clean these plastic bottles

Which is a shame because what we save in $s now will cost us much more than $s in the future.

> It is far more likely that those marks come from handling in the bottle washing-, filling- and labelling machines where the bottles gang and rub against each other.

Could be, either way it's a sign they are indeed reused. Thanks for the link.

It appears that the first system for paying people to return bottles was started in 1799.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation

Unfortunately even if you mark the don't add cutlery button you always seem to get a pile of plastic cutlery...

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