Last returnable 6.5 oz bottle capped today

[red-hungarian]

http://www.winonadailynews.com/news/article_fdc1a03a-1288-11e2-a0ce-001a4bcf887a.html

Don't panic Vendo 39/44 owners, Cavaleir 51 etc.... These are not to be confused with the 8oz no deposit bottles still in production. You can still get ammo for your belts and drums.

[wee]

WOW...The last bottle off the line brought $2000 at auction.....The remaining 5000 or so filled bottles are being sold off at $20 a pop.

Brian

[Roadman]

Thanks.  I like to use the 8 oz bottles in my USS64 and was thinking those were going out of production!!  Whew.  

Does anyone know where the 6.5oz bottles produced by this company were being sold?  I thought the 6.5 oz size as a refill was long out of production. There have been threads on this site about sanitizing used 6.5 oz bottles and hand transferring coke from larger bottles to be recapped with small scale cappers.

[SIGNGUY]

they have been rebottling the 6.5 oz for years.. that is why this is sooo historic.. they where the last one in the country still bottling the old original bottles..

I've been down there several times to buy bottles over the years and got to know the owners and shared stories with them about my Grandfather and his days in the bottling business..

It's pretty sad that this has to go away...

The guy who bought the last bottle for 2,000 is the owner of Viking Coca-Cola out of St. Cloud MN, which is the company that my Grandfather sold our Bottling and distribution operation to in 1989.

[Fire708]

If I read that right some of those bottles were made in 1948.
WHY is coke using plastic! Might be cheaper now but one purchase lasts 74 years seems like a good idea. I'd love to see glass for all soda. And bring back the deposit (we don't have one here), makes picking up,trash fun for kids.


Oh, if you didn't notice I'm kinda biased toward coke in glass bottles. It's just better on every level.

[GreginNM]

Agreed!!  I LOVED riding my bike around in Northern California and finding the glass bottles on the side of the road!  I picked them up and took them back to the Safeway supermarket, where I got 10 cents a piece!  That was big money for a kid at that time!  Great memories.

It seems to me it would be cheaper in the long run to wash and refill the returns for 10, 20 or 30 years or more rather than constantly buying plastic throwaways, but I'm sure that's not the case.  I still remember going with my mom to the store in the early 80s to get 7up in the large glass bottles for their cocktails.  I would pick out the older bottles and keep them rather than return them.  Every other trip or so I would score a bottle from the mid-50s...made my day!

Besides...tastes better from glass!!

[red-hungarian]

I used to collect returnable bottles for the mere 5c we got in the midwest as well as pop top cans. We'd use the claw end of a claw hammer to seperate the aluminum ends off the steel bodies for the recycle value. That was a lot of work and took a LOT of cans to get just a dollar worth of aluminum.

Agreed!!  I LOVED riding my bike around in Northern California and finding the glass bottles on the side of the road!  I picked them up and took them back to the Safeway supermarket, where I got 10 cents a piece!  That was big money for a kid at that time!  Great memories.

It seems to me it would be cheaper in the long run to wash and refill the returns for 10, 20 or 30 years or more rather than constantly buying plastic throwaways, but I'm sure that's not the case.  I still remember going with my mom to the store in the early 80s to get 7up in the large glass bottles for their cocktails.  I would pick out the older bottles and keep them rather than return them.  Every other trip or so I would score a bottle from the mid-50s...made my day!

Besides...tastes better from glass!!

[MoonDawg]

It seems to me it would be cheaper in the long run to wash and refill the returns for 10, 20 or 30 years or more rather than constantly buying plastic throwaways, but I'm sure that's not the case. 

      Yes, it would be cheaper to make the bottles one time and refill them, than to keep making glass bottles, then recycle them by melting the glass and remaking them all over again.
      My guess is lawyers were getting their payday by filing chipped glass lawsuits.
      Plastic throwaways don't seem to really get thrown away either, I understand there is a huge collection of plastics the size of an iceburg, floating somewhere in the Pacific ocean.

[collecture]

My guess is lawyers were getting their payday by filing chipped glass lawsuits.....I understand there is a huge collection of plastics the size of an iceburg, floating somewhere in the Pacific ocean.

I vote to make a raft out of the plastics bottles, put all the lawyers on it and let them float around the Pacific! 

[pinballdude]

They quit re-using the 6.5 oz bottles because everybody and his brother is selling them on ebay!
Besides, no one in the US makes glass bottles anymore.