Pool bottle

Pool bottles have a standardised shape and belong not to one company but to a shared pool. Since every participating bottler may fill them, returned bottles can be reused without costly separation.

Well-known examples are the standard bottle for mineral water and soft drinks and the standardised beer bottles. The benefit is short routes and high cycle counts. Retailers sort them by type into the matching crates. As a result bottles need not return to the original bottler, which saves transport routes and makes the reusable system more efficient.