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Comment by tfandango | Hacker News Reader

My city has stopped taking glass in the recycling saying the cost to recycle it outweigh the benefits. It makes me wonder why we don't just clean/reuse them instead like we did in the old days when we returned glass bottles to the grocery store.

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The relentless drive to make our labor available outside our local community in a single global labor market.

The trend of interconnected markets has pushed many families and companies to use more and more of their time getting cash instead of being productive in the home or local community.

In Germany they have the Pfand deposit scheme, where almost all beverage bottles and tins have a deposit charged on them, and shops have automated bottle and crate collecting machines, which you feed your bottles into and get out a receipt which entitles you to the deposit money off your next shop. You see very few stray bottles on the street, and those you do see are set neatly beside the bins for bottle collectors to pick up

yes that is almost exactly what we used to do in the 80s/early 90s (and probably before that), minus the automated part.

A couple US states have bottle deposit returns also, and they are highly effective programs. I don't understand why more places don't do it, and some places that do use it could increase deposit amounts slightly to get far better return rates.

Probably because they don't have the infrastructure setup to wash and reuse glass due to the competition from plastic. Most glass recycling is instead just smashing it which is a huge hit to the cost effectiveness of glass.

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