Re: Repair != Green
There is a distance over which returning beer bottles to the brewery becomes uneconomic - and generally breweries are fewer and farther apart than they used to be. Unbroken empty beer bottles are far bulkier than crushed brown glass. Different breweries use different bottles, so sorting would be required. The issue of reusing vs. recycling of bottles requires careful analysis. The energy cost of creating the glass is greater than that required merely to melt it into new bottles. Even reusing the bottles requires heat to sterilise and clean. If the bottles are not thoroughly cleaned - if some twit has spat their chewing gum into an empty bottle for example - product quality suffers.
Interestingly, Heneiken in the 1930s experimented with square bottles for export to developing countries, bottles which could be used as building bricks.