When Chris Clifford moved to Berlin a few years ago, he noticed something strange about the bottles of his favourite beverages.
The designs for many beers and soft drinks were exactly the same: dark brown glass with thin necks, and very little separating them except for their colourful labels.
‘The same bottles were being used across multiple brands,’ he says.
Mr Clifford, who grew up in Australia, later discovered that these bottles had been used before, sometimes hundreds of times.
Some even showed residue of an earlier life or two.
‘The glass bottle is taken back, cleaned, the label stripped off, and then another label is put on and bottled with [another drink],’ he says.
‘You can see that because a lot of the bottles have the label markings from the previous time.’
Germany is one of many countries around the world where manufacturers are required to reuse bottles — saving resources and energy, and limiting waste in the process.
So could a system like this be implemented in Australia? And how does it compare to recycling?
Australia’s recycling history
Decades ago, refillable bottles were relatively commonplace in Australia.
Milk was delivered in glass bottles, with empties picked up on the next delivery, while soft drinks were returned in wooden crates to be washed and reused.
‘Even I can remember when we would take the soft drink glass bottles back to the local refiller,’ Damien Giurco, a sustainability researcher at the University of Technology Sydney, says.
By the 1970s, Coca-Cola had introduced single-use plastic bottles to replace glass ones, and the lighter, more disposable material quickly spread.
And while bottles were dutifully collected in yellow-topped recycling bins around the country from the late 1980s, the vast majority of them (along with other recycling material) was sent to China to be processed until the mid-2010s.
This created a critical lack of capacity to process recycling in Australia, and limited how much of our plastic waste could be recycled — a problem that persists today.
Currently, PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles are the easiest plastic to recycle, but in the 2023-24 financial year, only about 40 per cent were recovered, and even less were recycled into new bottles.
Increasingly, as 10-cent bottle return schemes are introduced, and more PET plastic processing plants open, this figure is likely to increase.
But according to Professor Giurco, Australia’s recycling system is still trying to catch up on decades of inaction.
Recycle vs reuse
While the terms are frequently used together, reusable and recyclable mean different things.
Recycling is when a waste product is processed into its components to make a new item.
PET bottles, for example, are collected, sorted, washed and then shredded into flakes. These flakes can then be used to make the base material for new bottles, or other plastic items like clothes.
Reusable systems, on the other hand, try to increase the life of a product.
Reusable bottles can be collected at grocery stores or at container deposit schemes, where they are transported to be washed, refilled, relabelled, and then put back into circulation.
Glass is most commonly used in reusable systems, but hard plastic is an option too. While plastic is lighter, and might last a dozen or so refills, glass has one huge benefit: staying power.
A glass bottle can stay in circulation for years and hundreds of refills, and any damaged or broken bottles are simply put into the recycling stream to make new bottles.
Reusable schemes are seen as more sustainable than recycling systems, as fewer resources are used to melt down and remake recycled products.
While introducing reusable bottles may sound impossible in an Australian grocery store today, successful reusable and refillable bottle systems exist around the world.
‘Germany, Denmark, Mexico have all got a quite a well established refillable market for soft drink,’ Professor Giurco says.
‘It’s completely doable [for Australia].’
The German model
Henning Wilts, a researcher who focuses on circular economies and waste prevention, says Germany has ‘an almost closed loop system’ for PET bottle recycling, but also a large percentage of reusable bottles in shops.
We have a packaging law in Germany, introduced in the 1990s, that was focused on establishing a reuse system for beverages — for water, beer, and soda — that was mainly based around a mandatory deposit scheme,’ Professor Wilts, who works at the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, says.
Reusable bottles make up about 40 per cent of the German bottle industry, and in grocery and convenience stores, product labels indicate whether a bottle can be reused or recycled.
And no matter whether a bottle is reusable or recyclable, it is deposited the same way — back at the store it was purchased in a reverse vending machine.
‘If you’re having drinks in a park with friends and you’re using these bottles that are reusable, often there will be people walking around asking for your empties, because they’re going to get the deposit for themselves,’ Mr Clifford says.
No-one is ever going to throw those bottles into a trash can.
The one downside of glass bottles is that they are much heavier than plastic, and therefore cost more and use more energy to transport.
Modelling undertaken by Professor Wilts and his team shows that reusable plastic can be sustainable over long distances.
‘If you’re travelling less than 70 kilometres, then a reusable glass system is the best. But if your supply chain requires more transportation, reusable plastic might be the better option.’
The German system was started partially for environmental reasons, but also because of a much more pressing issue: money.
‘Back in those days, German municipalities were responsible for the collection and treatment of packaging waste, and they were completely overwhelmed with the increase in the waste streams,’ he says.
‘The conservative German government decided they had to involve the industry in the solutions for the problem … that’s why they introduced the extended producer responsibility scheme.’
Extended producer responsibility schemes make it the responsibility of the company producing, importing or selling a product to make sure the item is correctly disposed of or recycled. Successful schemes exist in Australia for a small number of products, like tyres.
Setbacks and a new system
Although reuse is the preferred option for environmentalists and governments worried about mounting volumes of waste, the biggest obstacle to improving the sustainability of bottle manufacturing systems is usually manufacturers themselves.
‘Ten years or so ago, Coca-Cola really fought against reuse requirements and obligations. They wanted to push their single use packaging materials, and they did that quite successfully,’ Professor Wilts says.
‘What you see right now is that Coca-Cola, especially, is shifting its strategy, focusing more on reuse, because they see a business opportunity, and of course, a lot of public pressure.’
According to Professor Wilts, many companies are extremely resistant to adding reusable bottles to markets that don’t already have the necessary systems set up, and are decreasing reusable bottles in markets where they are, because of the expense.
Even in Germany, ‘the business models of the big chains and the big companies in over the past decade has focused on single use packaging,’ Professor Wilts says.
‘Since the 1990s the share of reusable bottles has actually declined quite significantly. We started with almost 70 per cent and … currently we’re at 42 to 43 per cent.’
In Coca-Cola’s 2023 environmental update, the company highlighted that worldwide, 14 per cent of its beverages were in reusable packaging.
While it previously pledged to reach 25 per cent reusable packaging by 2030, the pledge was reportedly scrubbed from its website late last year. Since then, no new reusable commitments have been announced by the company.
‘We tailor our refillable packaging approach by market, based on local conditions. We continue to expand our use of refillable packaging in Latin America, Africa, Europe and parts of Asia, where the infrastructure is in place,’ a spokesperson for The Coca-Cola Company told the ABC.
‘We are focusing efforts to use more recycled material in primary packaging and supporting collection rates, both of which require enabling policies and the growth of collection infrastructure.’
According to Ben Madden, a researcher at the University of Technology Sydney who focuses on resource recovery systems, reuse is also doable in Australia if companies buy in.
‘The biggest issue with anything glass related is going to be the weight and the cost for transport,’ he says.
‘But if you can overcome those challenges, then glass is really ideal for reuse.’
We used to do these things, there’s no reason why we can’t anymore.
