when I say the jars open, I mean the screw on lids unscrew and come completely off the bottle getting water in the bottle and hot sauce in the water. it's a complete loss. I forgot to mention in my described process above that you have to check the tightness on every bottle when it comes out, and if it's done right they almost always need to be slightly tightened because they expand slightly further from the bwb, giving it a nice vacuum noticeable from the hiss you hear when it opens. (I'm going to go and edit my above post to mention this). now I'm not gonna lie, this technique involves developing some heat tolerance on your hands (you are after all hand tightening something that just came out of boiling water). or someone can come up with a less barbaric method than my "just use your hands sissy" approach. but finding a good non slip surface to do it on so you don't have to use the other hand to hold the bottle still helps (I use a textured glass cutting board). yes, I considered and tried using the jar tongs, but it ends up being more trouble than it's worth IMO. the kitchen I'm renting charges by the hour, so shaving down the time wherever I can is the name of the game. I've given thought to getting a torque wrench and finding the ideal tightness, and just using that. you can tell this is a topic I spend a lot of time thinking about. thankfully I'm better at actually doing it than I am at describing it.

The site below should help you out. I googled "old bottles" to find that site. You do realize that no one can help you without a picture, don't you? Here is a link that might be useful: dating old bottles

We have both bottle deposits of five cents plus mandated recycling of newspapers, glass, certain plastics and metals. I deal with the problem using colored garbage cans lined with plastic bags. One brown can for regular garbage gets collected twice a wook. A green box for newspapers and corrugated cardboard, which get collected once every 2 weeks, and one orange can for glass, cans, recyclable plastic that also gets collected every 2 weeks. In addition, my town has spring clean-up pickups and fall leaf pickups, also discarded hristmas trees. the town won't pick up large items like broken TVs and appliances, refrigerators with doors removed, any construction debris, unless I call a number and they send a special truck. Sounds complicated, but that's how we have it.

Try posting this on the Garden Junk site. They will be able to help you.