Washing and reusing glass bottles is really stupid in a desert. You have unlimited amounts of sand to make glass, but water is less plentiful. Plus kosher issues make washing bottles problematic (doable, but more complicated).
Now, water in Europe is recycled as well. Maybe I'm missing the context, but .. so far I'm unconvinced. And even IFF that would be true, not using a running tap would save more water.
Reusing bottles is stupid? Really? You want to create those from scratch, because .. you have sand? What happens to the old/used bottles? I cannot even begin to understand this point, tbh.
Kosher: I'm no expert on kosher regulations, but a bottle of coke (in a specific form) will stay a bottle of coke. Washing it, refilling it should (??) be irrelevant for people that want kosher stuff. If you consider Coke kosher (which - ignoring Coke - is arguably something that you have to decide for yourself. People often seemed to eat seafood but reject pork for example) then this bottle is just going to be cleaned and .. refilled with the same stuff. I don't see how kosher comes into play here?
Not to the degree that they do in Israel.
> And even IFF that would be true, not using a running tap would save more water.
Agreed.
> What happens to the old/used bottles?
Crush them and put them back in the ground. Energy is more plentiful than water in Israel, it makes little sense to spend precious water to make glass. Are you worried about waste? Of all things glass is hardly a problem, it's impossible for us to run out of it, and it causes no harm if buried.
> Kosher ... will stay a bottle of coke ... If you consider Coke kosher .. refilled with the same stuff. I don't see how kosher comes into play here?
Coke is kosher, it's actually one of the very first commercial products that was certified kosher. They had to tell the Rabbi all the secret ingredients. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/Kasheri...
Anyway the problem is that you don't know what they did with the bottle while they had it. Did they put other products inside it, and now the bottle is not kosher? Probably not, but it's a concern.
You can make the bottle kosher again by boiling it in water, but that costs you more energy.
But that didn't apply in my social circles. My selection of citizens (say .. more than one, less than two dozen people) were not observant. Some were gay. Some recently immigrated and had more or less about as much idea about Jewish laws as I did.
So while you might present a point for refusing recycling (?), people around me were really mostly complaining about the 'Ewww' part of using a bottle that someone else used. Maybe downed, and used as an ashtray afterwards. Etc. etc..
Do they not eat at a restaurant that washes dishes?
I doubt they actually thought about what they were saying.
There was no way to proceed. Obviously these guys did it that way at home. Stating that this is wasteful (and even worse for a restaurant!) didn't help. The 'sink full of water in which you dip all the dishes of the night and whatever you need to clean' was considered 'ewww'.
I'm still baffled today (we returned about 2.5 years ago). I still have exchanges about water usage (i.e. "It is our right to use as much water as we want to grow our garden") with my coworkers to this day.
They are both right and wrong. Restaurants use the tap to wash food off of plates (no soap). Then they sanitize (not wash) the dishes with bleach, and minimal water.
> I'm still baffled ... with my coworkers to this day.
I hope you do not consider them representative of Israel. Israel has lots of people, with lots of opinions and ways of doing things. I get that they were who you knew there, but I hope you'll categorize them as "that's how they do it", not "that's how Israel does it".
Now .. water? That's insane. You'll see lots of places that offer a 'lawn'. Which doesn't work without a lot of water. People seem to be rather wasteful. We (my wife and me) had discussions with Israelis about how to do the dishes (the 'German way', if that is really special, is filling your sink with water and washing your dishes. The 'Israeli way' - anecdotally, among friends - was running tap water) and about reusing glass bottles ("What? You have people that prefer to buy Coke in a glass bottle, because that bottle will be washed and reused? Isn't that totally baaah?").
We tried to discuss that topic a couple of times, but nobody local (in our circles) cared One. Little. Bit.
(Ironically we were in a hotel before we found our final apartment for our time in Israel and the management stole the bathtub plug from each and every room, citing water shortage as a reason. That was before we had all the conversations that are summarized above)
I'm glad that desalination works and helps. But the attitude might need adjustment as well, based on my non-scientific observations.