Here in Germany, beer bottles are not just recycled; they are reused. When you buy beer (and other drinks), as in some states in the U.S., you pay a deposit (called a Pfand). You must return bottles (including plastic water bottles) to a supermarket and redeem your deposit. Unlike in the U.S., this seems to be done by almost everyone on a regular basis. It is also common to see people leave empty beer bottles on the sidewalk or in the park (drinking on the streets is legal here) so that others can pick up the bottles and redeem the deposit.
In any case, apparently certain bottles — including beer bottles and “heavy” plastic water bottles — are not destroyed, but instead are sanitized and simply refilled for the next use. (Someone told me bottled are reused six times, but I am not sure how they keep track of that.) On the one hand, this is a great idea. It cuts down waste and makes me feel less guilty about using plastic and glass. And if they’re sanitized, there’s no problem. At the same time, the idea that bottles are not new takes a little getting used to. I guess it’s the same idea as using a glass in a restaurant. I wonder if this would fly in America.
Also interesting to note on this topic is that in some clubs and bars, you are charged the deposit, and then must hold on to a token and return the bottle and token to the bar to get your deposit back. In fact, yesterday I went to a street fair where the beer cost 2 Euro, but the bottle deposit was an additional Euro. If you bought a glass of beer (as I did), the deposit on the glass was 2 Euro. So we walked around the fair for an hour, and then returned to the stand where we bought our beers, handed back our glasses/bottles, and redeemed our tokens for the deposit.
Someone told me this is a way for the bars to hire fewer people to have to go around and collect people’s used bottles. Interesting idea. The bars probably also make a fair penny on deposits that are not redeemed because people lose their tokens or are too drunk to remember to get their deposit back. This got me thinking about how this works in the U.S. I guess bars pay the deposit and then redeem the bottles en masse, without explicitly passing the price on to the customer.
