Back in the Old Days when I was a lass, bottles used to be returnable. Pop bottles and beer bottles, certainly. I don't think wine was consumed in any great quantities. Not where I was a little girl.
Quite a lot of stuff in the old days was done out of mixture of financial prudence and preserved memories from the War and Post-War Rationing years. Waste not, want not. You used to have to pay for plastic bags at the supermarket, so sensible people had shopping bags, into which they placed their shopping.
In fact, in the Eighties, even when plastic bags came free, my parents had a trolley-sized shopping bag, which meant that you transferred stuff from the conveyor belt at till to bag-in-trolley, which was then transferred in one movement to boot of car and again in one further movement from car to house. Naturally, in the Eighties I considered it yet another manifestation of my parents' fundamental uncoolness, along with the washing and retaining of plastic bags, the keeping of string, brown paper, Xmas wrapping paper, the water butt, the hand-propelled lawn mower, the compost heap, home-made secondary glazing, absence of central heating. Oh, and fish from the fish van that used to come direct from Fleetwood on Wednesdays.
Nowadays it's all about disposability, capitalism's rapacious exploitation, which sucker us all in. Sure, sometimes convenience really is convenient, and thankfully the days are gone, at least in my little part of the world, where women 'didn't work' and instead stayed home all day doing nothing more than backbreaking household chores and daily trips to overpriced poor quality local shops with little to sell.
But bottles. Why don't we reuse them anymore? Administratively complicated? Perhaps. Inefficient? Maybe. Health and Safety? Well, I don't suppose anything that a good scrub wouldn't cleanse out.
Returning bottles would certainly cut down on litter. I have a feeling that glass is better than plastic. I now insist on buying tomato ketchup in glass bottles, despite having heralded the introduction of plastic bottles as easier. Yet what is easier than swilling out a nearly empty tomato ketchup bottle with pisspoor wine and calling it 'stock' before bunging it in a casserole? We used to get pennies when we returned pop bottles. And some beer bottles. Milk bottles, of course. Can't buy milk in glass bottles, now*. All plastic and cardboard, straight into landfill.
I don't think that re-using glass bottles is environmentally neutral but my gut instincts say that overall it's better than the constant use and discarding of plastic.
But I might be wrong.
* And before you ask, no, there is no chance of milk-float deliveries round here. Not on a road where there is at least half a dozen convenience shops and close to an imminent Tescos. Does anyone have their milk delivered by milk-float?
