In Germany shopw have to charge you 25 eurocent when you buy a plastic bottle which they will return when you bring the bottle back.
No such thing exists for glass bottles but they do get recycled. There are even separate recycle bins for white, brown and green glass. Yes, germans take trash separation seriously (on a related note, people in Japan too).
I think you’re missing the point. It’s ‘reusing’ versus ’recycling’. When you throw bottles in a recycling bin, you can’t reuse them because they’re broken. It then takes a lot of energy to turn them into new bottles. It’s a lot better to keep the bottles intact, clean them, and fill them again. That’s what a few countries have chosen to do. The way it’s done in Germany is unfortunately a lot more common.
Everything that you buy per crate is usually returned as a a crate with empty bottles again. Case in point: beer bottles.
Depending on brewery and type of bottle, I used to get beer that had the name of another beer printed on the (non-removable) snap-lock cap[1]. The same goes for a variety of other glass bottles. They are simply washed out (usually chemically), refilled, a new printed label is put on, a cap put on, done.
No such thing exists for glass bottles but they do get recycled. There are even separate recycle bins for white, brown and green glass. Yes, germans take trash separation seriously (on a related note, people in Japan too).