“American love—like Coke in green glass bottles … They don’t make it anymore.”

That might be true in the 1985 of the alternate universe inhabited by Rorschach, the sociopathic vigilante who penned that angsty line in Watchmen, the legendary graphic novel from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. But that’s not the case in the 2015 of the world we live in.

DC Comics

Coca-Cola in its iconic glass bottles is still being manufactured. But like that US lovin’ Rorschach misses, it’s more prevalent in other countries.

Reddit user Conservativeoxen posed a similarly themed question in the Explain Like I’m Five community: Why does the USA sell plastic bottles of Coke and Pepsi. But my local Mexican market sells it in glass? “Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a uniform product for regulation of delivery?” the user also wondered.

The simple answer: It’s all about global finances.

Before expounding on the why, let’s start with a little background: The glass-bottled Coca-Cola—Mexican Coke, as it’s sometimes called—is imported to the US from Mexico, where it’s bottled. The biggest difference—besides its packaging and usually higher price tag—is that it’s made with cane sugar instead of the high-fructose corn syrup (a half-and-half mixture for Coke sold exclusively in Mexico, although the bottles imported to the US reportedly only use sugar, according to Yahoo News) of its American counterpart. The reason? National economics.

Cane and refined sugar (CSIRO/Wikimedia Commons

Sugar is a cash crop for Mexico, which produced 61,182 thousand metric tons (TMT) in 2013, making it the world’s sixth-leading sugar producer that year. Since the late 1990s, Mexico has imposed corn syrup levies in order to keep it sugar demand high, according to Smithsonian.com.

Economics also factor into the reason behind the change in packaging. User Vox_Imperatoris cited an ELI5 post from a year ago that addressed the manufacturer’s thinking behind using glass bottles.

“In those countries, they have bottle deposits,” user GaiusPompeius wrote in that thread. “Re-using the bottles is cheaper (for the bottling plants) than producing new plastic bottles that are going to be thrown away.”

That deposit also has a direct effect for the consumer, something Vox_Imperatoris pointed out:

Other users backed up the “Coke in a bag” method. User gepgepgep even posted a photo in the thread:

Reddit user Gepgepgep

In fact, this phenomenon caught hold in 2012 when a hoax video was created around the idea of a Coca-Cola making its own drink bag.

As far as some of the non-financial—and non-environmental—merits of using glass over plastic, Reddit user Elijah6053 posted an informative video on soda (or pop, depending on your geography) that discussed just that (thanks to user kozukumi for the cued-up link):