In Asia, plastic bags are given for free, and I'm sure charging a few cents would have made a massive difference. Uber Eats, GoFood, and Grab Food all have made some changes so you can mark if you do not want the plastic cutlery. There is a company in India, Zomato, that even sends recyclable bags along the food. All of these changes should be appreciated by both media and consumers.
Recycling would never solve the problem alone. It's an illusion of a solution. Using less and less plastic and more alternative material would.
Add to that: Even if you can't be bothered to return a bottle for the Pfand you can just dump it in a visible place and it will be picked up in minutes and returned by somebody who needs the money more urgently than you.
As to whether those wear marks on glass beer bottles are from them touching together during transport I'd suggest that this actually is not the case. They shouldn't come into contact with another, seeing as they are transported in crates with pockets for individual bottles. It is far more likely that those marks come from handling in the bottle washing-, filling- and labelling machines where the bottles gang and rub against each other. If you're from Germany you might have watched 'die Sendung mit der Maus' ('the program with the mouse', a long-running television program aimed at children which amongst others details all sorts of industrial processes) where this process is followed from start to finish. Here's an example from the '70s:
I'm drinking from thick reusable/reused plastic bottle everyday here in Berlin, even coke is sold in them, they still exists
> it ended up being more expensive to clean these plastic bottles
Which is a shame because what we save in $s now will cost us much more than $s in the future.
> It is far more likely that those marks come from handling in the bottle washing-, filling- and labelling machines where the bottles gang and rub against each other.
Could be, either way it's a sign they are indeed reused. Thanks for the link.
Most of it will be feel good low impact measures and policies that mostly are a way for people on the inside to make money.
edit Why are incinerators purchasing stuff to burn at all? That should have been my first question. What is the profit in purchasing stuff to burn? Is this a energy production source or something?
Those things don't burn as well.
The truthiness of this statement depends a lot on the region of the world you are looking at.
In Europe there is a consolidated and expanding recycling market for many different types of materials. For example more that 30% in eight of the plastics sent to recycle in EU actually ends up being recycled [1]. (It would be closer to ~40% if it weren't for France.) These are big numbers that are having a meaningful impact on the amount of CO2 produced, not just "jobs programs".
BTW, a decade ago I met the owner of a factory that used only post-consumer plastic and he stated that his business was limited by the lack of good post-consumer plastics: the biggest share of the best kinds of plastics are being bought, at an higher price, by incinerators operators, leaving his factory and others to deal with second-rate plastic.
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/201...