Maybe for cans, but major brewers in Ontario use a small number of standard bottles, and when those come back through the return system, they are in fact pressure washed and refilled— a far more environmentally efficient process than sending them for general-stream glass recycling.

I worked briefly at the Molson plant in Etobicoke and they literally have machines which cut apart skids of 12-pack boxes, wash off the old labels, all of it.

That's an interesting point. Supposing the goal is actually to maximize bottle returns and that getting people to not just throw them in blue bins is for some reason an impossible task, are bottles likely enough to be damaged in transit that fishing them out of blue bins is still preferred to, e.g., just hiring those same people to sort through recyclables searching for bottles at a central facility?

I ask because with the current system those individuals have basically zero protections -- they aren't guaranteed at least minimum wage, they have no compensation if they aren't working (e.g. if they were stabbed by something in the blue bin), they generally have no other benefits (more of an issue in the US with healthcare, but this isn't a peachy situation elsewhere either), and so on.

The fact that the current incentive structure makes rifling through refuse attractive points to some sort of deeper issue. While I'm spitballing a bit with ideas, do you agree that something seems off with the status quo?