I recall when all drink bottles were recycled, with a deposit. A small coke was 5 cents including a 2 cent deposit. About 90-95% compliance. Companies would ste

I recall when all drink bottles were recycled, with a deposit. A small coke was 5 cents including a 2 cent deposit. About 90-95% compliance. Companies would steam clean, use a crossed polariser inspection light to check for cracks/dead mice and refill them. Now they have passed the plastic buck to the trash recyclers. Some jurisdictions have plastic bottle deposits and they have good compliance. Beer bottles are often still glass - recycled. There is huge puchback by supermarkets on deposits - they would have to count, sort, box millions of wet/sticky bottles, glass or plastic. Bottles can be bar coded and customers forced to feed them in one at a time into a machine that compresses them and drops them into category boxes = pure one type. Metal ones, the same method, another machine. Some towns in various places now because the forced return for a deposit by these machines is a net positive, as they get purer stream of semi pure plastic = $$ from recyclers, while mixed often have a fee to take away. They must mandate deposits/sorts/returns as the huge mass of waste plastic is already a serious problem and burning = carbon into the air.