The problem isn't that people aren't recycling enough. The problem is that recycling is now more expensive than landfills, because it is not producing valuable enough material. If we encourage more people to recycle, it will just cost even more.
It depends Where you live, in a lot of countries/regions neither separated waste bins nor products from recycled material are available. In Germany Both is present, making the process much more ready and economic than in the U.S. I wished though that more People would support this System, both in countries Where it’s facilitated but also in countries that have no central System for that in place.
I wonder if PET bottles could be reusable if not crushed. If they are still usable then they would just wash them in the factory and fill them again.
Of course, they could get scratched or something during use, but people could be taught it's better if you buy a scratched bottle than putting plastic bottles in landfills.
It's relatively hard to sanitize PET because tiny defects hold contaminants really well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_terephthalate#PET... Also I would guess that the defects add up over time and you'd need a way to test each bottle's integrity before shipping it out again.
It can be done. Two years ago I've seen it done with Coca-Cola bottles in Germany. They'd have those thick bottles with visible scratches coming from cleaning and reuse. About the same time as I first discovered this practice, they abandoned it for some reason; on my next trip, I found only regular, single-use bottles. To this day I wonder about the reasons behind this change.
> It's relatively hard to sanitize PET because tiny defects hold contaminants really well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_terephthalate#PET.... Also I would guess that the defects add up over time and you'd need a way to test each bottle's integrity before shipping it out again.
From your sibling comment. Just reposting since you might not other see it and it seems to address your question. Well, assuming these bottles are made from the same sort of plastic.
