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Comment by hatchnyc | Hacker News Reader

You are not wrong, but in some countries they collect, wash, and and reuse glass (and even special kinds of plastic) bottles. According to my parents that used to be standard practice in the United States. Someone should do the math first obviously but it seems like a great idea to me. If bottling is done locally you aren’t transporting the bottles long distance, and quite significantly in my mind glass is inert so if it does get into the environment, it isn’t leaching microplastics into the environment for the next thousand years.

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>According to my parents that used to be standard practice in the United States.

You're making me feel old. I used to sort bottles as a kid.

Soft drinks are just another example of gigantism in corporate life, economy of scale uber alles. There was a time when practically every small town had one or more bottling plants, the owners were pillars of the community sponsoring softball teams and the like. Delivery trucks typically had shelving rather than bays.

Following that there was a huge spate of consolidation. Small distributors/bottlers had their franchises taken away, canning became owned by the mothership and absolutely huge. The more centralized the more of a pain it becomes to sort/return/clean bottles.

I suppose it's like the history of car dealerships as they become fewer and larger. For that matter, a significant (most?) percentage of the US used to be self-employed instead of wage slaves.

> For that matter, a significant (most?) percentage of the US used to be self-employed instead of wage slaves.

Are you sure that's not just due to people moving away from agriculture? A family farm is a thing, but not really a family factory.

More likely retail- in my town the bookstore, stationary store, newsstand, hardware stores, etc. were all family owned until the big box stores opened up two towns over.

Both (farming and retail) of course.

When I was a kid the only businesses I can remember being non-locally owned were a Safeway and branches of two state-wide banks. This is in a town of 20k or so (at the time). There were small local manufacturing firms, 100% of restaurants were local (no chains), nearly all grocery stores were family owned, you could still make a living as a rancher.

Obviously there were franchises (gas stations, a small Sears store mostly for catalog ordering) but not very many.

The difference from modern times is remarkable.

And local druggists whose pharmacies also provided other services. It's not a particularly American thing, this transformation is everywhere --that does not imply it's good for everyone.

Finland has that system for glass bottles. Plastic bottles also are in system but those are shredded and aluminium is crushed. Used to be that they were washed and re-used, but I think there were some calculations that it was worse than single use... Or might have been some EU thing...

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