Bottles were not always cheap as they are today, and for 60 years, it made business sense for beverage giants like Coca Cola to actively recollect their glass containers and pay customers back for them. Until the dawn of PET. Swipe to learn more about Coca Cola and the secret history of recycling.

I do think it's incredible how so many consumers around the world are piously recycling their boxes and bottles. Out of the three R's, this is the one that gets the most attention. Yet at the same time, it's important to recognise that the rise of recycling was in part due to the massive marketing efforts made by the beverage and packaging industries to shift polluters' responsibility towards consumers. Coca Cola, especially, has funded and hid behind so many recycling campaigns that served as a double edged sword -- on one end, to tell you that pollution is your fault not theirs, and on the other, to excuse themselves from stricter government regulations. Sure, it's great for consumers to play their part. But what about the producers? What are they doing, apart from continuously lobbying against bottle deposit bills and greenwashing their plastic bottles as "100% recyclable"?

To be fair, when your entire business surrounds bottling up sugar and chemicals into plastic bottles, there's not much good that can be expected out of it. Rather than promoting recycling -- the one R that has capitalism's support -- we really could focus more on reducing and shifting away from convenient beverages altogether.

Some resources on the matter:

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