i think that all containers sold to the public and most if not all sold to businesses need to be easily recyclable, i.e., made from the same materials like glass, metal and maybe plastic
i wonder if i will get rocks thrown by both the left and right on this one
It's not as simple as just wanting to recycle. First, there has to be a profit incentive or theirs no sense in recycling.
Most consumer packagings are recyclable. They predominantly consist of glass, stone/earthen ware ceramics, paper, aluminum, iron/steel, plastic and wood. All of these materials are intrinsically recyclable.
The first step in any type or recycling is that you collect and sort the materials. The sorted materials them ussually need to be beneficiated (further refined) in order to be used as a raw material for a finished product or actually manufactured into a finished product. All along the way these materials need to meet specific production quality standards or they are of no value. When they can be beneficiated or manufactured to meet these standards they have value as a commodity.
Ultimately what drives any succesfull recycling effort is the ability to use these materials to manufacture a marketable product of acceptable quality and sell them for a profit and to point out the obvious, that aint all that easy.
For example, lets talk about glass. First there are waste glasses like, plate glass, windshield glass, architectural soda-lime glass, that has little or no contamination, is easy to process, of known quality and is relatively easy to market and sell as a raw material. On the low end side you have multicolored mixes of crushed container glass (aka 3-mix, it's mostly crushed soft drink bottles and such) which is virtually unusable as a raw material because ceramic contaminants make it unusable in almost all glass applications. Now that's in glass applications.
If you think outside the box you can see other products and applications that an unwanted material (by the glass industry), such as 3 mix glass. For example, you can grind 3 mix to a very fine powder. Container glass, when ground to a fine powder become hydrophillic. That means it was litteraly draw water from the air and form a glass cement. So one application for waste 3-mix is to grind it up very fine, mix it with water, cure it and make architectural monoliths that could be used for say, dam building, flood control levees, tide barriers, artificial reefs, etc but again, the trick here is "can you do that and turn a profit?". What's critical is that recycled materials are just commodities in the market and the market does not care if the materials are recycled or not nor should it.
That's also a problem cause lots of recycled products are of lower quality then products made from the virgin raw material. Paper is the best example of that. Paper made completely from recycled pulp is of such a low quality that it's almost worthless. A certain amount of virgin fiber must be mixed with the recycled fibers to make a quality product, which adds cost to recycling which brings us back again to the making a profit thing.
That's the important thing about recycling to remember. You can't just do it for altruistic reasons. It has to make sense from a market and manufacturing stand point.
