>I'd love to return the glass to the brewery for cleaning and reuse This is one of the few cases where glass "recycling" makes sense. Unfortunately, glass is s

>I'd love to return the glass to the brewery for cleaning and reuse This is one of the few cases where glass "recycling" makes sense. Unfortunately, glass is stupid cheap in terms of base material and production process so the only way to make recycling glass products worthwhile is to put the used product right back into service in its whole form (after cleaning of course). I'll try to find the study I'm thinking of but from what I recall, glass recycling isn't just uneconomical to recycle, it often winds up requiring more energy to recycle than it does to obtain the base materials and create a new container. Contamination knocks down the efficiency and the logistics of collecting and sorting glass are far less efficient than the bulk mining and transport of silica into a centralized production plant. A possible solution to this, IMO, is to force bottling operations to standardize on a handful of containers in different sizes, colors/opaqueness, and closure type. This could also work hand in hand with a ban on plastic bottles for common products like juice, soda, etc. Marketing departments would hate it but the centralized redistribution of reusable containers that are useful to every bottling operation would finally make glass recycling a rational concept.