Plastic bottles will be around long after us. They are stored with all of those plastic diapers, and plastic trash sacks. Disposable versus Quality Economics play the biggest role in our throwaway society. Cheap is too inexpensive just as quality is too expensive. Our limited resources fill our landfills three times as fast as they did thirty years ago.
Corporations pad their coffers as our pocketbooks empty at the same rate.
Another problem is that our society has thrown up its hands and now accepts the poor quality and disposable products produced by Corporate America. It is no longer sufficient to compete by producing a superior product at a competitive price. It is the goal of all corporations to produce products which are engineered to work as well as the competitor while being priced equally. The only difference is in the marketing. That place where one could take an expensive piece of equipment to be repaired.