Oh, never knew that "reuse" had such a meaning.

In Norwegian we have "gjenbruk" (literally, re-use) and "gjenvinning" (re-winning? More like re-newal than re-cycling). From an environmental point of view, re-use is (almost) always better than recycling. Our local school fleemarket has just gone through a rename, now it will be "gjenbruksmarked" instead of "loppemarked".

I'm often quite concerned about "green-wash", ideas that are sold in as "environmentally friendly" may not always be that environmentally friendly when looking closer at it. The whole word "recycle", with those green arrows indicating a circle, it's quite far from the truth. It's more like a "loop" than a circle ... just like the metro line 5 in Oslo (I heard rumors they had to make the London yellow circle into a loop as well, to be able to throw out people settling down on the metro) ... because the things produced from "recycled" materials are seldom recycled, and in any case they can only be recycled some few times.

About the pant, I do like the idea and think it can and should be extended to more products than only drinking bottles and cans ... and as we've moved from glass bottles to aluminium tins and PET-bottles, the system has also moved from "gjenbruk" to "gjenvinning" - and I believe at some point they completely stopped with pant on glass bottles.

The pant system is not without negative effects, it involves quite some overhead for one thing - particularly when we end up sort bottles after country of origin at home.