Seriously, if you got a bunch for every four bottles around here it'd take a couple of years and a shoe change to find enough of them to fund a PS5

Reusable glass bottles have their own issues, especially emissions from logistics if they are transported for longer distances.

Cleaning reusable bottles is energy intensive and uses a lot of water and chemicals. Melting and recycling glass is certainly more resource intensive than doing the same with plastics.

The best solutions to reduce resource intensity is local production and consumers bringing their own containers, going for dried instead of canned when it comes to fruits, beans and the like...

Glass Bottles are way too heavy and fragile.

But refill stations where you can refill your metal bottle and pay per litre would be a nice idea.

Glass soda bottles just hit different™ I would pay extra if it's an option

In case you didn't know, I think you might like to know: In Germany they also do reusable PET and reusable glass.

Glass bottles aren’t a free win. Glass is very heavy to transport and extremely energy-intensive to manufacture. It made sense back when people hardly drank any soda. It still makes sense for things like condiments (soy sauce, vinegar, etc) and alcoholic drinks but it doesn’t make any sense for everyday drinks like water or soda.

We should be investing in better municipal water treatment facilities so that tap water doesn’t taste awful. Where I live the tap water is horrible but I’ve visited places where the tap water tastes perfectly clean and pleasant. If we had universally tasty tap water then people would stop buying plastic water bottles.

As for soda, I could see glass bottles being excellent if we could bring consumption down to a reasonable level. Many people guzzle soda as if it were water which is both terrible for their health and the environment.

Oh boy, here I go ranting against misinformation about recycling again.

Your claim that 60% of these bottles will be burned is false. The recycling quota for single-use plastic bottles in Germany is 97.6% (2023; source).

60% was the quota of all non-recycled plastic packaging material combined, back in 2018. This quota has further decreased since, and is now at about 30% (2023, source), so almost 70% of all plastic packaging in Germany is recycled. It's still not perfect, but far, far better than just burning everything.

Recycling isn't an easy and cheap process, but it can definitely work and be steadily improved, if it's properly implemented. I'm so tired of this dumb suggestion, that recycling is bad because it's not perfect (or, in the case of the US, full of corruption). Every bit of plastic that isn't polluting the environment is a win. And recycling is definitely helping with that. As opposed to propagating false information on the internet.

If they're already working a full time job and just need the little extra money to get buy something nice for themselves, the pay is kinda irrelevant. Far simpler than on-boarding for a part time job you'll only need for 3 weeks.

You’re forgetting the person is also making the streets a cleaner place, having fun ( I enjoy picking litter), great for mental health, and choose your own hours.