Recycling glass is a similar deception. It aimply isn't often done due to the energy needed. It is used as filler un building materials sometimes. Aluminum is almost always recycled, but for food it usually requires plastic linings which aren't ideal. Deposits for glass containers seem like a good idea to me if anyone would bother with it. Make nonw food contacting stuff out of aluminium. Legos even, those would be amazing.
First off, glass will be reused; I dunno about the states, but in Europe there's a huge industry of paying a deposit when you buy something, getting it back when you hand it in, and the glassware gets cleaned and reused. Mainly for beer though, I think the scheme should be extended to other things as well.
Second, recycling is more energy efficient than making new glass; from Wikipedia, "Soda lime glass from virgin raw materials theoretically requires approximately 2.671 GJ/tonne compared to 1.886 GJ/tonne to melt 100% glass cullet." (cullet is just existing glass). However, it's usually mixed in with raw materials to make new glass, which reduces the energy needed: "As a general rule, every 10% increase in cullet usage results in an energy savings of 2–3% in the melting process, with a theoretical maximum potential of 30% energy saving.[5] Every metric ton (1,000 kg) of waste glass recycled into new items saves 315 kilograms (694 lb) of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere during the manufacture of new glass.[6]"
TL;DR: Recycling of existing and well-known reusables (glass, aluminium, steel) uses a lot less energy than making new. This isn't the case for plastic yet though, as it turns out.
It used to be that in Sweden 33cl sodas were in glass bottles that were in the same wash/reuse scheme, as well as 1.5l hard PET bottles. You could tell how old a bottle was by how scratched up it was. That was replaced by 0.5l recyclable PET bottles with the rationalization was that transporting the heaver bottles was worse than recycling them due to truck emissions. I always suspected it was a lie by Coca-Cola so they could use custom shaped bottles and less generic designs. And even if it was true, I wonder how EV trucks change that equation.
You sure about that? Beer bottles aren't shattered and melted, they're just cleaned and reused. Altglas is remelted but according to the environmental office saves 10% of energy and of course 100% of raw materials[1]. If they're lying that's one thing but you merely call out deception which is an intentionsal skewing, not outright contradiction, of the truth, which is evidently not the case here.
That's not a given. You don't have to recreate it from oil but instead put it in a new shape. I don't know whether that's better (separately from the trash problem), but it's not necessarily better to create new than to reshape old.
