Aluminum uses a lot of energy to refine, but not to recycle AFAIK. Notice that aluminum is easily the most profitable thing for people to recycle; people can c

Aluminum uses a lot of energy to refine, but not to recycle AFAIK. Notice that aluminum is easily the most profitable thing for people to recycle; people can collect cans and take them to a recycler and get paid a fair amount of money. The same just isn't true of almost anything else (except probably copper, and of course precious metals). Even steel, which is far more dense, doesn't fetch nearly as much in scrap value. The thing about standard glass bottles sounds pretty good, but I can't imagine that ever being legislated here in the US. It would have to be Federal, and there's no way you'll get Congresspeople from across the country to agree to something like that. It can't be state-based because then it wouldn't work: you wouldn't be able to get the standard bottle adopted even within a single city, because part of the city is in one state and part is in another state or two.