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Glass is the hidden gem in a carbon-neutral future
- legulere 5y agoOne use for recycled glass is insulation in the form of foam glass. Another win for the environment.
- speeder 5y agoMeanwhile for years people used to say glass last forever and thus instead we should use biodegradable plastic...
- ouid 5y agoWhen you say people, who are you referring to? I have never heard anyone claim that.
- wlll 5y agoI (from the uk) have never heard that personally.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- neltnerb 5y agoWhat! Where did they say that! I've always been told to recycle glass because it's easy to make new glass from, is this a recent thing? Sounds like malicious advertising from people making PLA garbage, which I mean literally since "compostable plastic" rarely is without expensive industrial composting equipment (instead it contaminates the compost so you can't use it) and PLA (while theoretically recyclable) is not so in basically any curbside recycling anywhere. If you collect it special and find a specialty recycler it can be done, but it's hardly going to fall apart sitting in a landfill in an anaerobic (oxygen-free) environment.
- foobarian 5y agoMy understanding is that recycling glass is energy intensive to the point where it's not economical, leading recycling programs like in our local town to choose to dump the collected glass instead. The most effective recycling seems to be for aluminum due to high energy cost of converting the ore, and low cost of melting the metal.
- Natsu 5y agoIt might not be quite the same as recycling bottles, but I worked for a cut & tempering shop where we would recycle all of our waste glass. We recycled many tons of waste glass and were paid for it.
- neltnerb 5y agoFor sure aluminum recycling is more cost effective than glass recycling, but I've definitely never in my life heard the suggestion that it's better to literally put glass in landfills instead... that really sounds like the kind of topsy-turvy logic you get out of a company pushing plastic. Granted this is a biased source, but they claim that "Energy costs drop about 2-3% for every 10% cullet used in the manufacturing process," [1] so it really seems like in principle it should be less expensive to recycle it (by a little bit) and that if it's more costly than making it fresh it's due to logistics rather than any fundamental manufacturing cost. [1] https://www.gpi.org/glass-recycling-facts https://www.gpi.org/glass-recycling-facts
- brnt 5y agoPeople often confuse money cost with environmental cost (at least it makes it easy to know who published the study ahem). Here in NL the monetary cost for melting glass is about 85% of sourcing new glass. So it's a small win. The envirnmental cost reduction is the raw materials saved. Beer bottles are almost all reused for a number of times though, greatly improving their environmental impact. Wish they would do the same for wine bottles.
- foobarian 5y agoYeah looks like fully recycled glass at best requires 30% less energy input than virgin glass. And the single-stream logistics are enough to make that uneconomical, unfortunately. Aluminum recycling energy input is 95% less than smelting - that is a very nice gain, meaning you get 20x the material for the same energy cost vs. 1.42x.
- willvarfar 5y agoI recall people in the UK saying in the 80s we should use plastic bags instead of paper to save the trees. But cordial was still sold in glass bottles with a deposit. The only negative sentiment I recall for glass was a belief that discarded bottles started forest fires and killed animals that crept into them but couldn’t get back out.
- dredmorbius 5y agoGlass degrades (physically) ultimately to inert pebbles or sand. Not sure who you were hearing this from, if you were, but it was a bogus argument.
- gumby 5y agoAs was posted on HN a few weeks ago this seems to have been part of an advertising / propaganda effort by the plastics companies, alongside the idea of recyclable plastics.
- ganzuul 5y agoHave some relevant science! - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutectic_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutectic_system Similar to this is metallic glass, which has the potential to be injection molded. If we can figure out Fe-based bulk metallic glass then a lot of problems will be solved.
- neltnerb 5y agoIn terms of recyclability, I don't think metallic glass has any advantage over polycrystalline metal. It's much stronger though.
- justinator 5y agoWell if we can’t recycle it does it break down into tiny particles that then become a part of the food chain? If the answer is no then maybe worth a look.
- neltnerb 5y agoHuh? We use metal for all kinds of containers. Yes, I think it is better to use metal than plastic when possible (and we can recycle it). Metallic glass and metal are both made from the same atoms.
- justinator 5y agoRight, the line of thinking is there a material that has the advantages of glass (reusable) without the disadvantages(heavy, easy to break, questionable integrity) and without the disadvantages (environmental pollution). Sounds like aluminum would fill this niche to me, although that’s energy intensive to produce.
- neltnerb 5y agoWhy try to find one material that fits every application? Steel cans are better for canned goods where the pressure is low and they rely on design more. Aluminum is usually better for cans of soda under pressure where they're stronger. Glass is heavy, but strong in certain compression modes. It's nicely recyclable but does use more fuel to transport. Plastic is lightweight and really I wish we didn't ever start using it except as it is -- a space age high tech super material that deserves better than to be unnecessary packaging. Paper I'd love to see used as much as possible, but it falls apart when wet. Cardboard is better when a bit wet, and is cheap and easily reusable. I don't think we need one answer here, each of these cost different amounts and it depends on the application. What I'd like to see is instead a list of alternatives to every plastic application using metal, glass, paper, whatever it takes.
- recursivedoubts 5y agoas a treat i will occasionally let my boys get a "mexican coke", which is coke from mexico that comes in a real glass bottle and has real sugar, rather than corn syrup my oldest asked why, since it tastes so much better and feels so much nicer to hold glass, we don't have this style of coke here well, son, we are too rich to afford that
- alex_young 5y agoThe bottles you’re drinking out of may actually be reused too. We used to do the same thing in the US, but we shipped all of the equipment to Mexico when we ‘upgraded’ to plastic.
- lhorie 5y agoThese days, the story is a bit more complicated. Not all Mexican coke is made with sugar anymore[0] > In 2013, a Mexican Coca-Cola bottler announced it would stop using cane sugar in favor of glucose-fructose syrup. It later clarified this change would not affect those bottles specifically exported to the United States as "Coca-Cola Nostalgia" products. > A scientific analysis of Mexican Coke found no sucrose (standard sugar), but instead found total fructose and glucose levels similar to other soft drinks sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, though in different ratios. The shift to plastic, as I understand, mostly has to do with freight economics: glass is heavier and more fragile. Personally, I wouldn't mind a third alternate consumption model: fill your own container. Many places already have fountain drink machines. It's really not that big of a stretch to allow reusable bottles there [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Coke https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Coke
- lobocinza 5y agoCoke on Brazil has a returnable container. It's not glass though but a thick plastic. When you return it to the store you pay a lot less. Returnable glass bottles for beer are also predominant here. Logistically it makes sense because the trucks would return base empty otherwise.
- nielsbot 5y ago
- jagger27 5y agoWhat are the arguments against all beverages using those standardized reusable beer bottles? Why melt down perfectly good glass when it can be safely reused a solid dozen times before finally being recycled? I’m wondering how much glass bottles contribute to transportation-related emissions versus aluminum and plastic.
- depereo 5y agoI can think of one - you do not know the heat/impact stress it has received when out of your custody, and don't want to be responsible for its unexpected shattering while your client is using it. Reforging adds some guarantees.
- ordiel 5y agoOf course you dont want that... In the US, where they will sue you for looking wrong at people or they will rally up a crowd in protest... In the rest of the world where people are normal that is not a problem. Specially considetong that if the glass is already fragile it will either crack during cleaning or while being transported. If the bottle can handle being clinking on the bands while being filled up, I am sure it can stand being on the fragile hands of some folks
- ARandomerDude 5y ago> In the rest of the world where people are normal that is not a problem. That seems overly broad. The rest of the world includes some pretty nasty places.
- _Microft 5y agoThis is not a nice comment and a rather reliable way to either get your comments downvoted, flagged or to get your account banned eventually. There are some guidelines for commenting linked in the footer of the page. For your convenience: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments
- 14 5y agoWith all the glass being thrown away for some reason the concrete industry came to my mind. Made me wonder if crushed glass could be used in concrete since glass is essential sand? I know concrete needs a specific type or sand and maybe glass would be a no go for cement but it popped in my mind and has me wondering what we could replace the sand with. Also the main issue I see with glass is it is at least twice as heavy. So the carbon emissions savings would need to offset the transportation emissions.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoAnother comment mentions this is done in New Zealand. It appears adding glass to concrete increases durability, while adding plastic or rubber decreases durability (sidenote: adding rubber to asphalt increases durability of tarmac/road surfaces, while reducing maintenance costs and road noise). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0950061820332463 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09500... http://asphaltmagazine.com/asphalt-rubber-pavement-moves-east-and-north/ http://asphaltmagazine.com/asphalt-rubber-pavement-moves-eas...
- 14 5y agoThanks for the links!
- robocat 5y agoAs I understand it, the sorting, cleaning and transportation of recycled glass is more costly (i.e. worse for the environment) than using virgin materials. In New Zealand AFAIK collected glass is crushed and added as sand to concrete (perhaps reducing logistics waste?): https://productspec.co.nz/media/f2ebqrwk/architects-booklet-eco-glass.pdf https://productspec.co.nz/media/f2ebqrwk/architects-booklet-...
- Baeocystin 5y agoHere in California, the local landfill crushes the mixed-color glass and uses it as a cap on the day's waste to help keep things contained. It's an important function, and (IMO) a good use for the glass. I do believe that the sorted-clear glass is still valuable enough to be diverted back in to new production.
- _Microft 5y agoEquating cost with environmental friendliness might not be the best thing to do because this exactly fails in systems where externalities are not priced in yet.
- robocat 5y agoI agree. But the externalities of sorting/cleaning/transportation would also need to be measured. The article sort of mentions this, but overall it is a typically unbalanced "recycling is 100% good" and "More countries need to pass laws to reduce waste and eventually stop sending glass to landfill" without the balance of looking at the total waste of recycling versus using virgin material. Meanwhile, I think money is often a good proxy for environmental damage (especially as an individual), because the safest bet is to assume externalities are similar even for two very different choices.
- fencepost 5y agoIt's not a huge use, but in the US I believe ground recycled glass is spread over freshly painted road markings while they're wet so it bonds into the top.
- CephalopodMD 5y agoIt takes a lot of gas to 1. get glass to a recycler and 2. Ship that recycled material to bottlers, stores, etc. It's not really a panacea for that reason.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hinkley 5y agoWhen I was a child you exchanged the coke bottles at the grocery store. This decreases the footprint of the glass because you were going to the store anyway. If the distributor also transports the empties back on the same vehicle, then the footprint is mostly down to the production side - a bottle of Coke costs what a bottle Coke costs.
- stormbrew 5y agoA heavy truck uses more gas than a light one. It's never free to move heavy things around, it's just another externality. There's certainly some economy of scale to having the grocery store do the moving instead of individually owned cars doing 'small' (on an industrial scale) runs to depots, but it's really pretty hard to account for.
- agileAlligator 5y agoStill a helluvalot better than just burying that glass in landfills. Requires gas to get it there as well, yaknow.
- citruscomputing 5y agoCan't help but wonder... You're supposed to reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order. Could we standardize a few glass container shapes, and provide easy ways to return them for re-use, rather than spending the energy breaking them down and melting them back into the same shapes again? I would be fine with all my bottled drinks coming in just a few shapes.
- smallnamespace 5y agoDoes the melting process need to run nonstop? If not, you can use cheap off-peak renewables for it too.
- kortex 5y agoCurrently yes. There's a lot of heat capacity to the furnaces so a cold start requires a lot of heat to get to nominal. That's not to say one couldn't be designed in such a way that it can be set to idle without losing too much heat. It's probably much easier to do that if it's electric vs nat gas.
- hervature 5y agoI can't tell if this is satire. We used to do exactly this with milk bottles. From [1]: "In 1975, 94% of milk in the UK was in glass bottles, but as of 2012 this number was down to 4%." The reality is that plastic is so much cheaper that people balk at the cost of recycling exactly like the price of humanely treated chicken eggs even if they want to do the right thing. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_milk_bottle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_milk_bottle
- blitzar 5y agoProud to say that my milk is in the 4%. Interesting how sometimes progress is a step in the wrong direction, the milk man even had an electric car way back in the day! > balk at the cost of recycling exactly like the price of humanely treated chicken eggs even if they want to do the right thing That is right before they balk at paying the farmer more than 25p a litre to produce the milk they are going to drink.
- endisneigh 5y agoa carbon neutral future will never come as long as wealth inequality exists at the levels they're currently at. all carbon negative or neutral actions will disproportionally harm the poor and middle class who will use political power in order to prevent said changes. i'd love to be wrong, but the evidence is there. reusing glass, though is environmentally friendly, would drastically increase the price of beverages. it's not going to happen at scale.
- KaiserPro 5y agoI don't think this article is based in fact. Glass cannot be infinitely recycled, as they point out later on, glass containers can be recycled, but not windows. it gets more contaminates in. Also colour glass needs to be treated separately. They also seem to not understand that melting glass eats a fucktonne of power. From my reading of this: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/old/5703.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/old/5703.pdf Using 100% recycled glass only reduces energy use from 4.3 megawatt hour per ton(for virgin glass) to 3.8mwhr per ton By far the biggest saving is to reuse the bottles. unless i've missed something, this article is pure horse shit.
- comradesmith 5y agoSand mining is ecologically destructive.
- coryrc 5y agoDepends on the kind of sand, that worry is more about sharp sand. I believe ocean sand can be used for glass?
- godelski 5y agoWhile this is true, I'm not sure this statement alone is helpful to the discussion. I'm not sure that mining of any material is not ecologically destructive. So we have to compare _how_ destructive different materials are to gather and then probably full chain. Given the glass can be recycled, that's an advantage on full chain. Maybe someone knows more than me (not my field) but I'm willing to bet that glass is better in both amounts when compared to the popular alternative, plastic.
- KaiserPro 5y agoI should clarify that I am not against recycling of glass. I actively do it (but then I live in Europe. I agree that we are using sand at an unsustainable rate. However I am disputing the assertion that the USA recycling its glass will make a material impact on climate change, compared to switching to nuclear/solar/other
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- YetAnotherNick 5y agoI can't get the point of the article. I don't think we ever reached a point that we recycled plastic so many times that it started loosing its property. Most of the applications of plastic doesn't even require best grade plastic.
- dghughes 5y agoHere in Canada in my small province there had been a "can ban" for many decades. The ban was mainly to protect the jobs of local bottling plants although the reason was spun that it was to be green. Then in May 2008 the ban ended. Up until then it was only glass even 750ml pop which seemed massive. Pepsi had twisted spiral 750ml bottles that seemed to weigh 10kg each. When the can ban ended the 355ml pop bottles were replaced with plastic pop bottles but the plastic were 590ml. The 750ml glass disappeared and were replaced with 2 litre p[plastic bottles. At my old work we had a pop machine in the lunch room it had glass bottles. It was obviously designed to have plastic bottles or cans. When the bottle fell it sounds like someone dropped a bag of hammers from two floor above you. I observed how my co-workers who were used to drinking 355ml of pop now bought 590ml bottles of pop. The lunchroom fridge was stuffed with half drunk plastic bottles. Over the next few weeks there were fewer and fewer half bottles. Then eventually just a few half drunk 590ml pop bottles in the fridge. People unknowingly had trained themselves to drink nearly double the amount of pop. I wish I had recorded it in more detail. It was a fascinating human behaviour event to observe.
- generalizations 5y agoI read about a study where people were given soup to eat, in various quantities, and some were given bowls rigged to be bottomless. In general, they ate until the bowls were empty - except for the bottomless bowls, where they'd eat far more than any of the other groups. I'm drawing on a 15-20 year old memory, so that's IIRC.
- martingoodson 5y agoThis experiment was probably falsified. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/08/20/did-that-bottomless-soup-bowl-experiment-ever-happen/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/08/20/did-that-b...
- dghughes 5y agoI've heard the same about those studies. I've seen it described as three different sizes of popcorn tub or three sizes of plates. It made sense but it seems to be debunked or maybe the debunk story is not true either? In my situation it was right before my eyes and quite obvious.
- kortex 5y agoI'm surprised to read in these comments that bottle reuse at the commercial scale is quite common in some areas. Here in NY we recycle glass but it's primarily through single stream recycling or via bottle deposit machines, which I believe both smash the bottles and mix the streams. I presume this is because bins of broken glass are significantly higher bulk density than in-tact bottles. Seems like this boils down to a logistics and handling problem. I think we are reaching a point where it makes sense for an "ISO Container" but smaller scale, for ease of automated logistics. Something basically like a milk crate but better for automated stacking, shuttling along conveyers, and un/loading by robots. It would be an interesting way to come full-circle for glass bottle reuse. Edit: did some digging and I guess Euro boxes are a thing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_container https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_container https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systainer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systainer
- masklinn 5y ago> I'm surprised to read in these comments that bottle reuse at the commercial scale is quite common in some areas. In euro beer country, bottle deposits are super common even on table beer (your basic lager), there’s automated sorting machines which work on crates (24 bottles, of either 25cl or 33cl) as well as singles and spits out a barcoded ticket you redeem at the till, usually using it to pay for the next crate.
- paulkrush 5y agoThey state in the article if the world 100% stops making new glass we will save 19 lbs of co2 per person from being emitted. 86m tons world wide per year. Stopping a 1/2 beef burger from being made will save 18 lbs of co2 equivalent from being released. So glass is not the place for a big greenhouse gas impact. What sucks is if I don't buy this big burger I will not stop it from being made. I will just make it cheaper for others to eat beef.
- aj7 5y agoGlass bottles are heavy. QED.