Bottle Reuse
Better than Recycling
Producing a bottle takes a lot of energy. Then after the newly made bottle has cooled, it is shipped to the company which placed the order. At the bottling factory it is filled with a delicious beverage, capped and packaged. You purchase the six pack and take it home to drink with some friends. You pop the top and drink the contents. Many times the bottle goes right into the trash. The worst option!
Some people are doing all they can by recycling the bottle. It then goes to the recycling center which takes much more energy than reusing. That option would be a bottle reuse facility here in town that would clean the bottles and make them ready for use again. With the conglomeration of local breweries that we have here it would be a great idea if we initiated this t type of facility.
In our small community we have four popular breweries, Carver’s, Durango Brewing, Ska, and Steamworks. If these companies would get together and start a reusable bottle program it would save both the community landfill and the breweries a lot of money. All that would be needed is for them to go in on a bottle cleaning facility. If the four of them split the costs it could be an affordable venture. Even Zuberfizz could get involved.
If all of these companies used the same bottle they could easily be recycled in our community back to the breweries. There would be a refund for each bottle that is brought back. Historically, containers like these were very highly valued commodities. There is no reason to just simply recycle them the energy that goes into that process is immense. Reusing these bottles would have a positive impacton the environment.
Some may argue that people are not interested and the waste of space for the breweries storing the extra bottles would be too much. Well that is too bad. There used to be reusable coca-cola bottles where have they gone? America has become a society that does not care about waste; we would rather throw something away than take the time to wash and reuse.
In some European countries they have continued the use of these reusable products and the benefits are showing. According to earthisland.org, more than 99 percent of all glass bottles in Sweden are returned to them intact, to be cleaned and refilled. These bottles travel from the brewery to the consumer and back an estimated 33 times before they're finally melted down at the Holmegårds Glassworks. That is an amazing amount of use. If we could get this kind of use out of our containers it would be a huge step in the right direction.
According to readingreen.com. glass bottles comprise 8% of our waste in the United States. Having reuse facilities set up across the country will be a huge benefit to the environment. We can start the reuse revolution in our small mountain town by initiating this type of program. If nothing else we will be taking a step in the right direction to reduce waste and the wasting of energy that it takes to manufacture these bottles.
Royce Johnson
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