Is there a push to make product containers re-usable?

etchinghillside@reddthat.com to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 70 points –

I’m looking at an empty bottle of Valentina hot sauce. It has a flip top cap but is not twist off and seems to be press fitted on in some way - ideally there would be a way to easily remove it and re-purpose the container or at least clean it out for recycling.

With some recent legislation in some countries to standardize USB-C it got me wondering if there are pushes elsewhere or if maybe it’s just my country just hasn’t caught up on things.

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Cleaning and sanitizing glass bottles is how it used to worked before the lie of recycling.

They don't want to go back to that. Removing it cut all kinds of overhead, especially labor. It cost them a lot of money to have people bring back the bottles and clean them.

Now they can dump it all on consumers and recycling plants.

They don't care if consumers don't clean the bottles well enough to be recycled. They don't care that consumers often put un-recycleables in the bin, often ruining a whole batch of recyclables. They don't care if the recycling plant can't actually make money off the recycled material.

They got what they wanted. Their product everywhere with less responsibility for their business. They will always go with what saves them money and pushes the social responsibility onto someone else.

Yeah, I usually assume anything I put in recycling ends up in the same location as everything else. I can usually find a few temporary or permanent uses of containers though if I don’t have to slice my hand apart trying to gnaw off press fit cap.

Understandably this is the results of cost savings and profit.

Well, you're doing the right thing with re-using containers yourself. It was always Reduce, Re-use, Recycle, with Recycle being dead last and least important of the three. Recycling isn't inherently bad, but corporations leaned on it for decades as a way to wipe away their own responsibilities and hand them over to consumers and the recycling industry. It's mostly just been abused, despite being the least important.

Docker containers are already plenty reusable!

Alright please proceed to ignore my unfunny programming joke.

I knew what I was doing when I created that title.

Denmark (and probably Germany) has this for certain beer bottles...

We have it on all drinking bottles and cans except wine, liquor and milk products.

And we have it for drink bottles here in Australia, but not hard liquor or cooking sauce bottles.

I do encourage OP to complain to their local MP equivalent though.

https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2023/09/11/refillable-wine-bottles-coming-to-oregon/

I don't get this one. It only works by using the bottle deposit infrastructure that's been there since the 70s and barely breaks even on carbon at the current recycling rate (about 1/3). Standardized wine bottles can be reused by any winery participating, but that also means either restricting ones market to places within the deposit network if you actually want to keep the bottles in the system or just hoping enough return to make it slightly cheaper than new bottles even after replacing filling equipment.

I use Kilner glass jars for home made preserves. The jars come with non-reusable lids, so you have to buy new lids when you re-use the jars for the next batch. Until I discovered the lids from Stokes mayonnaise jars are a perfect fit for the Kilner jars. Good thing I like mayonnaise.