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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

It always staggers me that people in many developed countries are so proud they recycle.

Recycling is the worst good thing we should be doing.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. In that order.

I've been to many, many developing countries around the world that have extremely good reuse programs for their bottles, and it works extremely well.

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> developing countries around the world that have extremely good reuse programs for their bottles, and it works extremely well.

In fairness, Germany is a developed country with extremely good reuse programs. Glass beer bottles are often totally reused. You can, if you want, avoid plastics entirely and just buy drinks glass containers. The local supermarkets all have return bins; all restaurants will take them, although they won't give you your deposit - which seems like a very fair deal to me.

The one odd exception is milk. A classic example of American container reuse, but I don't see any milk sold in glass in Germany.

Milk in returnable bottles exists here. The bottles usually look like this:

https://contentpool.wirtschaftsverlag.at/files/uploads/image...

From the look it is a half-liter bottle (we usually buy cream like this), there are 1 liter bottles for milk that look almost the same.

Hmm. They don't sell that at Lidl - and are you sure the containers are reused? I don't see the tell-tale scuff ring.

You can find them at Rewe or Edeka for example. It is a Mehrwegflasche which means they are cleaned and reused instead of being recycled.

What is a scuff ring by the way? Is it this ring that tears off from plastic caps at e.g. Coca Cola bottles when opening them?

Here is a photo that shows what I mean: https://images.app.goo.gl/hnbaFiZtWAN7Aj5x5

It looks like the bottles rub against each other at that point, and it indicates the bottle is old/has been used a bunch of times. Is there a German word for it?

Thanks! They are called "Umlaufspuren" (literally ~traces of circulation) according to the german Wikipedia-page for "Mehrwegflaschen."

I will look out for them.

This used to exist, and was even fairly common, in many countries. Moreover it was brought to your door by the milkman. And that milkman sometimes also had eggs and even vegetables from local farmers. This disappeared, driven by economics/capitalism/'supermarket=freedom'/..., not because it's bad per se. In fact there's quite some benefits to that whole system from an ecological point of view.

Which leads to sort of funny situations: locally it's been about 20 years since the milkman made his last round. Now there's again a company starting to do a similar thing (bring bottled milk/juice, local farmer's products to your door weekly) and some people who don't know better consider it revolutionary, and the poor company can't keep up with demand :)

In NL these were electrical vehicles.

Well I do find it interesting that last mile grocery delivery is kind of like a modern day milkman..

In the UK we get milk in those bottles delivered by the milkman. We leave the empty ones out as well to be collected.

Careful about the milkman: https://youtu.be/lZTrb49wi3o?t=30 (scene from James Bond, The Living Daylights)

That movie was the first time I learned about "milkman" being a job. We had glass bottles that we filled ourselves at a self-service station that a farm just outside the city set up.

That is a one litre bottle of milk as sold by SPAR in Austria.

These bottles are sold at Spar, Aldi (Hofer) and many others.

However they don't have Pfand and are not reused at the moment [1]. At least not comercially. They make great containers for sugar or flour. According to the source they will start the reusing "beginning 2020".

1. https://www.spar.at/nachhaltigkeit/produkte/verpackungen/meh...

The current German system is nothing compared to the former East German bottle reuse system. Disclaimer: I grew up in East Germany, and during a summer break when I still was at school I worked in a small local brewery in the bottling facility at various machines for a few weeks, seeing the system in action.

In East Germany we only had very few bottle designs that were used throughout the entire country and all firms filling something in bottles used those designs. You could return a bottle filled with beer in the north of the country by one company and return it in the south and refill it with lemonade.

When I worked in the brewery we had trucks carrying returned glass bottles coming in, several per day. The labels on those bottles did not matter at all, only the form of the bottle did. They were sent through the washing machine, followed by a visual inspection station (today that would be automated, back then somebody had to sit there and watch endless streams of bottles pass in front of a bright white light source).

New bottles were fed into this system maybe 5% of the total nr. of bottles, maximum. The bulk of the bottles we filled had just been collected from all other the "Kreis" (county) that or the previous day.

There was slightly more variety for bottles with spirits, but non-alcoholic beverages and beer all had a handful of generic designs only:

- https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8a/2a/16/8a2a16b9573f33af14e1...

- https://www.picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/283478094305_/DDR-Fl...

- https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/TdAAAOSwy6hc0vzC/s-l400.jpg

- https://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/MTYwMFgxNjAw/z/01kAAOSwoptdW8pU/$...

The current German system has all kinds of bottles and LOTS of restrictions. The labels have to match, I cannot return bottles unless the shop sells these exact bottles (including the brand). There were no restrictions in the GDR and only very few designs to deal with. There also were no plastic bottles and cans, or if we had any they were too few for me to even remember. Sure, that last one is confounded by time, there were not that many in the West in the 1980s either.

That sounds exactly like the current German system for beer bottles (although the range of beer bottle shapes has increased, so it's not as efficient anymore).

No, it is not the same at all! We now have a lot of restrictions on what can be returned to what store. They have to sell those exact bottles. For the automated plastic return stations you even have to have the label still on the bottle - if the label doesn't match, even if the actual bottle is exactly the same, the machine does not accept the return. You can't return everything anywhere.

In East Germany it worked for all bottles too, not just for beer bottles. The brewery where I worked also bottled various non-alcoholic drinks, suing the exact same bottles for all. The switch from one liquid to another didn't take long and was quickly performed, just restack different labels, flush the previous liquid, then restart the bottling with little overall delay. The bottles already in the queue remained the same.

German: https://www.n-tv.de/ratgeber/Wo-kann-man-welche-Flasche-zuru... ("Inside the German bottle jungle: Where can you return which bottles?")

True in regard to where you can return. But beer bottles are still distributed locally if possible, and not sent to whoever put the label on last.

That was the case across the USSR. Really impressive reuse of glass bottles. Nowadays even the cheapest food comes in glass jars, not sure how that came to be. Nothing seems to be reused...

Unfortunately bottle shapes and designs are often seen as part of a brand identity, so any attempt to introduce standardized containers will be fought tooth and nail.

Thus demonstrating that brand identity, advertising and marketing are all part of the problem.

There are no restrictions to returning in larger supermarkets, or the so called "Vollsortimenter" like Edeka, Rewe. Even Aldi(Nord) and Netto take everything. In fact, the only one being picky is Penny and Lidl. Maybe it's a regional thing? Or a function of size like upwards of XXX sqaure meters shopping space you are forced to take in everything?

For one-way returns (= stuff that's shredded locally and recycled as materials) stores over 200 m² have to take everything, but for reused bottles there is no such law.

That may be the case, but in practice i can go into a real,- and drop anything there.

edit: same for the Rewe's i know. edit: err, and Kaufland.

I buy milk in glass bottles in Germany: Kaufland, Rewe, organic shops all have it.

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