Yes, actually, people do use those. In Norway you get about 30 (US) cents per bottle you return, so not only does virtually everyone have a bag in their home for empty bottles, restaurants and other businesses that serve beverages also collect the empties from customers for a not-insignificant additional revenue source.
The return stations are in every grocery store, so it's just a thing people do when they go shopping.
Soda/water bottles aren't even thought of or referred to as "disposable", even if you are out somewhere and throw them away in a public bin, someone will come along and collect them for the money. It's actually pretty common practice to leave them on top of or next to the bin to make it easier for them.
In Germany, the share of bottles and cans that are returned lies around 96%.
That’s 16.3 billion bottles being returned using that system you claim doesn’t work, and 0.7 billion bottles make it to the landfill or are recycled otherwise.
Even outside of that, Germany is much cleaner than cities in the US.
The vast majority does, yes, over 90% of the bottles in many European countries gets recycled. You get money back when you do. It means that there's even random people who struggle economically for whatever reason that will pick these up when they find them in nature or when thrown away incorrectly to make sure they're recycled.
Plastic is recyclable (at least PET, what plastic bottles and caps are made out of). But that's only the case if it's pure. So for example a mixture of PET and PLA can't be recycled, as both need different processes, and the mix would probably end in a landfill.
Single use plastic bottles are part of a deposit system (in Germany at least, but I think also in more European countries). So the bottles get deposed of in a different way than regular plastic trash, and can therefore be recycled without needing to filter out other plastics.
The attached cap makes it harder to loose the cap, guaranteeing that it gets returned with the rest of the bottle instead of being thrown in the trash separately, and ensuringmore caps are recycled.
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u/ISmellLikeBlackTea 7h ago edited 7h ago
One is illegal, highly unsafe and will never be used in reality, besides milking investors out of even more money and the other one reduces waste