Epistemic status: quick research to answer my own curiosity.
AI use: research (reuse process, examples), image attribution, grammar and light phrasing.
While researching Gluten-free water I stumbled upon a story about beer bottle sterilization. This reminded me that in Germany beer bottles are apparently reused, which was surprising to me, so I decided to dig deeper.
In Germany they have separate bins for glass recycling, sorted by the color of the glass.
In the image above, the text says that you can throw glass in only between 7am and 8pm. If the container is not yet full, the distance the glass has to fly before hitting something is substantial, so it makes a super loud ding or sometimes even breaks completely.
So at first I assumed that beer bottles from here were reused. Technically they are, but not in the way I thought: they are melted down and remade into new glass.
In Germany there is also Pfand, a deposit you pay for a plastic, metal or glass container when you buy it, so that you are incentivized to return it later.
Photo: Mattes, Wikimedia Commons, public domain. A Tomra reverse vending machine at an Aldi in Munich, 2006. The sign says it takes only Aldi's one-way PET deposit bottles; the display shows 3 bottles, total 0.75 EUR, i.e. 25 cents each.
You get a receipt which you can exchange for money or spend in the store. Sometimes the machine does not accept a perfectly valid bottle and you have to try multiple times in a row.
Bottles with this logo get crushed and recycled, not refilled. Refillable bottles, confusingly, have no standard logo at all; they usually just say "Mehrweg" (multi-way) somewhere on the label or the glass. So there are really two deposit systems. One-way containers (plastic, cans, and also one-way glass) carry a legally fixed 25 cents and get crushed and recycled. Refillable bottles carry 8 cents (the standard beer bottle) or 15 cents (water, juice, soft drinks, swing-top beer), amounts the bottlers set among themselves.[1]
It is interesting how this legal quirk shapes the culture. There is even a sticker campaign, "Pfand gehört daneben" ("the deposit belongs next to it"):[2]when you are partying and about to throw away a container with Pfand, you leave it next to the bin instead of inside, so that a bottle collector (often a pensioner or a homeless person) can pick it up, return it, and get your Pfand without digging through the trash.
So the glass bottles returned through this Pfand system are reused. What shocked me originally is how this could be safe. We don't know what people put into that bottle before returning it. Anyone who has watched a backyard-chemistry channel like Cody's Lab knows that glassware at home gets used for all kinds of things. What if the bottle is chipped?
It turns out the washing is more serious than I imagined. The returned bottles go through a washing machine that soaks them in two to four tanks of 1.5-3% sodium hydroxide at 60-80 °C, which dissolves labels, glue and anything organic, and then rinses them.[3]After that an empty-bottle inspector photographs the sidewall, base and mouth for chips and hairline cracks, a high-frequency sensor checks for leftover lye, and an infrared sensor checks for leftover liquid such as oil; anything flagged is kicked out.[4]The white scuff ring you see around old German beer bottles is the wear from dozens of trips through this machinery.[5]And since glass is chemically resistant, you cannot contaminate the glass itself.[6]This is enough to make all my concerns moot.
A glass bottle survives up to about 50 of these refills before it is finally melted,[7]and roughly four out of five beers in Germany are sold in refillables.[8]
I've found only one documented example of this process going wrong: an official German laboratory's 2005 report describes cleaning solution remaining in a returned beverage bottle and an apparent failure of the empty-bottle inspection.[9]That demonstrates that the risk is not zero; it does not establish how common such failures are today.
After a bit more thought I understood that the relative risk of this is actually minor, since whatever you put into the bottle has to pass through the cleaning process and all the checks. If someone has nefarious intentions, it is much easier to just tamper with the final product in the grocery store before someone buys it. The only difference is that in the case of a returned glass bottle it should be practically impossible to attribute the bottle to its previous owner, whereas tampering in the store leaves a video trace. In any case, such attacks are extremely random, so I suspect that's why there is not much interest in doing them.
Examples:
Pizza dough, Maine, 2020: A fired employee of a dough maker put razor blades into packaged pizza dough on the shelf of a Hannaford supermarket in Saco, Maine. Three customers found blades in what they bought; nobody was hurt. Store surveillance video showed him handling the dough. He pleaded guilty and in December 2021 got 4 years and 9 months in federal prison plus about $230,000 in restitution.[10]
Ice-cream licking, Texas, 2019: A man filmed himself licking ice cream and putting it back into a Walmart freezer. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail in 2020. An important detail: surveillance showed that he subsequently bought that carton.[11]
Germany is not the only example of such bottle reuse. Canada's standard 341 mL beer bottle is refilled about 15 times on average, with a ~96% return rate.[12]In the US there is no federal system, but some states have deposit programs, and Oregon even has a statewide refillable bottle program.[13]The US itself ran mostly on returnable bottles into the 1960s.[14]The Schlitz "every bottle cleaned" story from my last post was about exactly this.
Verbraucherzentrale, "Mehrweg oder Einweg: Wichtige Unterschiede beim Pfand", as of 21 April 2026: "Das Pfand für Mehrwegflaschen beträgt meist 15 Cent. Bei Bier-Mehrwegflaschen sind es nur 8 Cent." and "werden auf Einwegverpackungen immer 25 Cent erhoben." The refillable deposit is a civil-law agreement among the bottlers, not a legal amount; the 25 cents on one-way containers is set by the Verpackungsgesetz. One-way containers carry the DPG logo shown above; there is no uniform logo for refillables. ↩︎
Heuft (an inspection-equipment maker), "Empty bottle inspection: HEUFT InLine II IR": sidewall, base and finish inspection, high-frequency detection of "health hazardous lye remains", and infrared detection of residual liquids such as oil and varnish. Krones and KHS sell equivalent machines. ↩︎
Solenis, "Reduce the severity of scuffing and etching on returnable glass bottles", 14 April 2023: scuff rings form "just below the neck and on the bottle's base" from the washing cycle, conveyor transport, and bottles rubbing against each other and the guide rails, and get worse with every refill cycle. ↩︎
CVUA Stuttgart (Chemisches und Veterinäruntersuchungsamt, a Baden-Württemberg state food lab), Jahresbericht 2005, Teil B, p. 34: refillable plastic bottles that were misused to store strong-smelling cleaning agents or solvents are, "im Gegensatz zu Glas" (in contrast to glass), no longer fit for refilling. ↩︎
Deutsche Umwelthilfe, FAQ "Klassische Getränkeverpackungen", 2019: "PET-Mehrwegflaschen erreichen bis zu 25, Glasmehrwegflaschen bis zu 50 Wiederbefüllungen." The 50 is a ceiling, not an average. ↩︎
CVUA Stuttgart, Jahresbericht 2005, Teil B, p. 33, "Ätzende Lauge in Fruchtsaftgetränk": a consumer-complaint sample of a fruit-juice drink in a refillable bottle had pH 11.9 and, by calculation, about 12% cleaning lye, and was judged injurious to health. The product came from outside the lab's jurisdiction, so the circumstances could not be clarified; "Offensichtlich hat die Leerflaschenkontrolle nicht funktioniert" (obviously the empty-bottle inspection did not work). ↩︎
Ten US states have container deposit laws. The Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative's Refill Program was "launched in 2018" and calls itself "the nation's only statewide refillable bottle program"; its bottles can be washed and refilled up to 25 times. ↩︎
Container Recycling Institute, "The decline of refillable beverage bottles in the US": refillables were about 95% of soft-drink volume in 1960 and 67% in 1969; for beer, 47% was already sold in one-way containers by 1960, and refillables were down to 8% of volume by 1984 and 3.3% by 1998. ↩︎
Epistemic status: quick research to answer my own curiosity.
AI use: research (reuse process, examples), image attribution, grammar and light phrasing.
While researching Gluten-free water I stumbled upon a story about beer bottle sterilization. This reminded me that in Germany beer bottles are apparently reused, which was surprising to me, so I decided to dig deeper.
In Germany they have separate bins for glass recycling, sorted by the color of the glass.
Photo: Salino01, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. White, brown and green glass, left to right.
In the image above, the text says that you can throw glass in only between 7am and 8pm. If the container is not yet full, the distance the glass has to fly before hitting something is substantial, so it makes a super loud ding or sometimes even breaks completely.
So at first I assumed that beer bottles from here were reused. Technically they are, but not in the way I thought: they are melted down and remade into new glass.
In Germany there is also Pfand, a deposit you pay for a plastic, metal or glass container when you buy it, so that you are incentivized to return it later.
Photo: Mattes, Wikimedia Commons, public domain. A Tomra reverse vending machine at an Aldi in Munich, 2006. The sign says it takes only Aldi's one-way PET deposit bottles; the display shows 3 bottles, total 0.75 EUR, i.e. 25 cents each.
You get a receipt which you can exchange for money or spend in the store. Sometimes the machine does not accept a perfectly valid bottle and you have to try multiple times in a row.
This is the symbol for the one-way deposit:
Photo: MalteFilmFan, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Bottles with this logo get crushed and recycled, not refilled. Refillable bottles, confusingly, have no standard logo at all; they usually just say "Mehrweg" (multi-way) somewhere on the label or the glass. So there are really two deposit systems. One-way containers (plastic, cans, and also one-way glass) carry a legally fixed 25 cents and get crushed and recycled. Refillable bottles carry 8 cents (the standard beer bottle) or 15 cents (water, juice, soft drinks, swing-top beer), amounts the bottlers set among themselves.[1]
It is interesting how this legal quirk shapes the culture. There is even a sticker campaign, "Pfand gehört daneben" ("the deposit belongs next to it"):[2]when you are partying and about to throw away a container with Pfand, you leave it next to the bin instead of inside, so that a bottle collector (often a pensioner or a homeless person) can pick it up, return it, and get your Pfand without digging through the trash.
So the glass bottles returned through this Pfand system are reused. What shocked me originally is how this could be safe. We don't know what people put into that bottle before returning it. Anyone who has watched a backyard-chemistry channel like Cody's Lab knows that glassware at home gets used for all kinds of things. What if the bottle is chipped?
It turns out the washing is more serious than I imagined. The returned bottles go through a washing machine that soaks them in two to four tanks of 1.5-3% sodium hydroxide at 60-80 °C, which dissolves labels, glue and anything organic, and then rinses them.[3]After that an empty-bottle inspector photographs the sidewall, base and mouth for chips and hairline cracks, a high-frequency sensor checks for leftover lye, and an infrared sensor checks for leftover liquid such as oil; anything flagged is kicked out.[4]The white scuff ring you see around old German beer bottles is the wear from dozens of trips through this machinery.[5]And since glass is chemically resistant, you cannot contaminate the glass itself.[6]This is enough to make all my concerns moot.
A glass bottle survives up to about 50 of these refills before it is finally melted,[7]and roughly four out of five beers in Germany are sold in refillables.[8]
I've found only one documented example of this process going wrong: an official German laboratory's 2005 report describes cleaning solution remaining in a returned beverage bottle and an apparent failure of the empty-bottle inspection.[9]That demonstrates that the risk is not zero; it does not establish how common such failures are today.
After a bit more thought I understood that the relative risk of this is actually minor, since whatever you put into the bottle has to pass through the cleaning process and all the checks. If someone has nefarious intentions, it is much easier to just tamper with the final product in the grocery store before someone buys it. The only difference is that in the case of a returned glass bottle it should be practically impossible to attribute the bottle to its previous owner, whereas tampering in the store leaves a video trace. In any case, such attacks are extremely random, so I suspect that's why there is not much interest in doing them.
Examples:
Germany is not the only example of such bottle reuse. Canada's standard 341 mL beer bottle is refilled about 15 times on average, with a ~96% return rate.[12]In the US there is no federal system, but some states have deposit programs, and Oregon even has a statewide refillable bottle program.[13]The US itself ran mostly on returnable bottles into the 1960s.[14]The Schlitz "every bottle cleaned" story from my last post was about exactly this.
Verbraucherzentrale, "Mehrweg oder Einweg: Wichtige Unterschiede beim Pfand", as of 21 April 2026: "Das Pfand für Mehrwegflaschen beträgt meist 15 Cent. Bei Bier-Mehrwegflaschen sind es nur 8 Cent." and "werden auf Einwegverpackungen immer 25 Cent erhoben." The refillable deposit is a civil-law agreement among the bottlers, not a legal amount; the 25 cents on one-way containers is set by the Verpackungsgesetz. One-way containers carry the DPG logo shown above; there is no uniform logo for refillables. ↩︎
"Pfand gehört daneben" is a non-profit sticker campaign started in 2011 by Matthias Seeba-Gomille and backed since 2015 by the soft-drink brand fritz-kola. Horizont, "Fritz-Kola und Wynken, Blynken & Nod weiten bekannte Pfand-Aktion auf ganz Europa aus", 2 February 2021. ↩︎
Solenis (a maker of bottle-washing chemicals), "Extending the life of returnable glass bottles: why efficient washing matters", 29 October 2025: after pre-rinsing, bottles pass through "cleaning tanks (typically two to four)" at "1.5% to 3.0% NaOH concentrations", "heated between 60°C and 80°C". ↩︎
Heuft (an inspection-equipment maker), "Empty bottle inspection: HEUFT InLine II IR": sidewall, base and finish inspection, high-frequency detection of "health hazardous lye remains", and infrared detection of residual liquids such as oil and varnish. Krones and KHS sell equivalent machines. ↩︎
Solenis, "Reduce the severity of scuffing and etching on returnable glass bottles", 14 April 2023: scuff rings form "just below the neck and on the bottle's base" from the washing cycle, conveyor transport, and bottles rubbing against each other and the guide rails, and get worse with every refill cycle. ↩︎
CVUA Stuttgart (Chemisches und Veterinäruntersuchungsamt, a Baden-Württemberg state food lab), Jahresbericht 2005, Teil B, p. 34: refillable plastic bottles that were misused to store strong-smelling cleaning agents or solvents are, "im Gegensatz zu Glas" (in contrast to glass), no longer fit for refilling. ↩︎
Deutsche Umwelthilfe, FAQ "Klassische Getränkeverpackungen", 2019: "PET-Mehrwegflaschen erreichen bis zu 25, Glasmehrwegflaschen bis zu 50 Wiederbefüllungen." The 50 is a ceiling, not an average. ↩︎
Umweltbundesamt, "Erneut leichter Anstieg bei Getränken in Mehrwegverpackungen", reference year 2020: beer is the segment with the highest refillable share, 78.9%. Across all beverages the refillable share was 33.5% in 2020 and 34.5% in 2024, against a legal target of 70%. ↩︎
CVUA Stuttgart, Jahresbericht 2005, Teil B, p. 33, "Ätzende Lauge in Fruchtsaftgetränk": a consumer-complaint sample of a fruit-juice drink in a refillable bottle had pH 11.9 and, by calculation, about 12% cleaning lye, and was judged injurious to health. The product came from outside the lab's jurisdiction, so the circumstances could not be clarified; "Offensichtlich hat die Leerflaschenkontrolle nicht funktioniert" (obviously the empty-bottle inspection did not work). ↩︎
US Attorney's Office, District of Maine, "Sanford Man Sentenced for Tampering with Pizza Dough", 2 December 2021: 57 months in prison, 3 years of supervised release, $229,611.92 in restitution. The former-employee, three-customers and surveillance details are from the AP report, "Man who stuffed razor blades in pizza dough gets nearly 5 years in prison", 3 December 2021. ↩︎
Click2Houston, "Port Arthur man seen in viral video licking Blue Bell ice cream sentenced to jail", 6 March 2020: 30 days in jail, a further 6 months suspended, $1,000 fine, $1,565 restitution to Blue Bell. The purchase: Time, "The Texas Man Who Licked Blue Bell Ice Cream Was Arrested", August 2019: "Surveillance cameras later tracked Anderson taking the carton out of the freezer and buying it." ↩︎
Sightline Institute, "7 Beverages Found in Refillable Containers in British Columbia, Oregon, Washington", 3 December 2015: "The Brewers Association of Canada reports a 96 percent return rate on domestic glass beer bottles" and "They refill a bottle 15 times, on average, before it's worn out and ready to recycle." The 15-refill average is also in British Columbia's BRCCC 2024 stewardship report. ↩︎
Ten US states have container deposit laws. The Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative's Refill Program was "launched in 2018" and calls itself "the nation's only statewide refillable bottle program"; its bottles can be washed and refilled up to 25 times. ↩︎
Container Recycling Institute, "The decline of refillable beverage bottles in the US": refillables were about 95% of soft-drink volume in 1960 and 67% in 1969; for beer, 47% was already sold in one-way containers by 1960, and refillables were down to 8% of volume by 1984 and 3.3% by 1998. ↩︎