system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why do glass bottles have to be “recycled”?

Why can’t companies just sanitize and refill them?
gpt
Some do - beer bottles for instance are reused that way.  But there are a lot of those.  For the most part, there are small numbers of a lot of different bottles scattered across the country, and collecting, sorting, and then returning those to the specific places that use them is not economically viable.  Easier and cheaper to melt them down and make new stuff.