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.
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.