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Glass bottle recycling could be much more efficient if we (in the US) still did what we used to do: wash and sterilize the old bottles and then reuse them. (of

by whyenot 13y ago

Glass bottle recycling could be much more efficient if we (in the US) still did what we used to do: wash and sterilize the old bottles and then reuse them. (of course, collection costs might also be higher since you need to get used bottles back to the right bottler without damaging them).

lambda 13y ago
Some dairies do that, by including a $1 deposit on bottles. At $1, it's actually worth your while to collect and return the bottles to the store where you got them (likely when you go shopping for your next bottle of milk).
- thrownaway2424 13y ago
  In my town you can arbitrage them by buying quarts of yogurt at the farmers' market where the deposit is $1.25, and returning the bottles to the grocery store, that carries the same brand of yogurt in the same bottles, where they pay $1.50 for returns.
  - ars 13y ago
    Reminds me how food stamps can be used to buy soda. Some people who had more than they needed would buy soda, pour it out, and return the bottle just for the deposit. They fixed that by making the deposit not payable by the food stamp.
- vidarh 13y ago
  Norway has a bottle tax ranging from 0.5 to 2.5 NOK I think (been a while since I lived in Norway; 2.5NOK is roughly 43 cents), and a recycling rate for glass bottles of something like 99%. The key, in addition to the bottle tax, is automated bottle collection machines in pretty much all grocery stores that'll issue receipts to be used to offset against purchases at the till. It's so convenient most people return them, and the bottle tax ensures most of those that gets thrown away gets picked up by kids or poorer people for the money. Most undamaged glass bottles would be returned to bottlers by volume rather than origin, for washing and reuse, apart from Coke bottles for obvious reasons. Though these days most of the bottles are still plastic, but are still largely recycled - even if the energy savings isn't all that huge, it still saves a lot of landfill space.
  - LeonidasXIV 13y ago
    In Germany shopw have to charge you 25 eurocent when you buy a plastic bottle which they will return when you bring the bottle back. No such thing exists for glass bottles but they do get recycled. There are even separate recycle bins for white, brown and green glass. Yes, germans take trash separation seriously (on a related note, people in Japan too).
    - Samuel_Michon 13y ago
      I think you’re missing the point. It’s ‘reusing’ versus ’recycling’. When you throw bottles in a recycling bin, you can’t reuse them because they’re broken. It then takes a lot of energy to turn them into new bottles. It’s a lot better to keep the bottles intact, clean them, and fill them again. That’s what a few countries have chosen to do. The way it’s done in Germany is unfortunately a lot more common.
      - LeonidasXIV 13y ago
        Actually, Germany does both. The 25ct thing is a more recent development.
    - rmk2 13y ago
      These things certainly do exist. Everything that you buy per crate is usually returned as a a crate with empty bottles again. Case in point: beer bottles. Depending on brewery and type of bottle, I used to get beer that had the name of another beer printed on the (non-removable) snap-lock cap[1]. The same goes for a variety of other glass bottles. They are simply washed out (usually chemically), refilled, a new printed label is put on, a cap put on, done. [1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCgelverschluss https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCgelverschluss
      - LeonidasXIV 13y ago
        You're right, I have no idea how I forgot about this. Shame on me.
    - 13y ago
ars 13y ago
This sounds great, but would actually hurt the environment, not help it. Of all the things on this earth to recycle, glass is the very last one. The planet (the crust anyway) is basically made of glass. (60.2% of the earth's surface, by mass, is glass.) It's, by far, the most plentiful raw element there is. Next closest is alumina at 15.2%. Recycle it for some energy savings? Sure. But if you are going to waste water, and heat, for it you are really doing exactly the opposite of saving energy - not only are you wasting energy, you are wasting water, and time. Pretty much the only things worth recycling are metals.
- kragen 13y ago
  Glass is not an element. Neither is alumina; alumina is a compound of two elements, aluminum and oxygen. Glass is a kind of solid which can be made of virtually any substance, including water, steel, and alumina. Very little of the earth's surface is actually made of glass (although some is: pumice and obsidian are glasses) but all of it could be made into glass. It's true that every recycling process uses energy and other resources. That's why the first choice is "reduce" — read your neighbor's newspaper instead of just sending it off to be pulped. The question is how much energy you're using, and how much the alternative non-recycling process would use. If you're comparing heating a bottle from 20° to 73° to sterilize it and heating it to 1400° to melt it, you will find that melting it uses, unsurprisingly, about 30 times as much energy as sterilizing it. It's going to take a heck of a lot of water desalination to make up for that much energy.
  - ars 13y ago
    (When I said element I didn't mean it in it's chemical sense, but rather in the composition sense.) Glass is SiO2, and that is what the crust of the earth is made of. It's not amorphous, but that doesn't make any difference. To sterilize a bottle using water you have to heat water, not just glass. Water takes a huge amount of energy to heat. Your calculations are not as straightforward as you think. Plus heating something at home to sterilize it is not anywhere near as efficient as doing it in bulk. To melt glass takes 984.2 J/g. A glass bottle weights about 200g. So about 200kJ. That much energy will raise about 1kg of water 50 degrees. 1kg of water is about 1 liter. 1 liter of water is not enough to sterilize a glass bottle unless you had a perfectly shaped container to hold it. So final result: melting the glass uses less energy than sterilizing it. Plus no water. Plus the glass plant can probably recover most of the waste heat. Plus no need to wash the bottle. Plus no need to sort and transport to the original location. And now you know why almost no one does it: It's a bad idea.
tirant 13y ago
In the Netherlands glass bottle and plastic bottles,cost between 0.25€ and 0.50€ more, money you get back when you return them to the store. As a consequence of reciclying, the beer is usually cheaper when bought in glass bottles and beer crates (0.20€ - 0.30€ per 0.3L bottles) thus people usually buy those. It's a win-win situation for everyone :)
- Samuel_Michon 13y ago
  Only beer bottles carry a deposit (€0.10), all other glass bottles are to be disposed of in glass recycling containers (and doing so breaks the bottles). Beer bottles are the only ones being reused, not recycled. Although surrounding countries use a deposit system for aluminum cans to combat litter, the Netherlands does not. Also, even though PET bottles carry a deposit (€0.25), relatively few of the bottles that are returned are actually used to create new bottles. For instance, a Coca Cola PET bottle consists of just 25% recycled plastic. Lastly, starting in 2015 PET bottles sold in the Netherlands will not carry a deposit. Next year, PET bottle collection will move from store level to the municipal level.

by whyenot 13y ago

lambda 13y ago

Some dairies do that, by including a $1 deposit on bottles. At $1, it's actually worth your while to collect and return the bottles to the store where you got them (likely when you go shopping for your next bottle of milk).

thrownaway2424 13y ago
In my town you can arbitrage them by buying quarts of yogurt at the farmers' market where the deposit is $1.25, and returning the bottles to the grocery store, that carries the same brand of yogurt in the same bottles, where they pay $1.50 for returns.
- ars 13y ago
  Reminds me how food stamps can be used to buy soda. Some people who had more than they needed would buy soda, pour it out, and return the bottle just for the deposit. They fixed that by making the deposit not payable by the food stamp.
vidarh 13y ago
Norway has a bottle tax ranging from 0.5 to 2.5 NOK I think (been a while since I lived in Norway; 2.5NOK is roughly 43 cents), and a recycling rate for glass bottles of something like 99%. The key, in addition to the bottle tax, is automated bottle collection machines in pretty much all grocery stores that'll issue receipts to be used to offset against purchases at the till. It's so convenient most people return them, and the bottle tax ensures most of those that gets thrown away gets picked up by kids or poorer people for the money. Most undamaged glass bottles would be returned to bottlers by volume rather than origin, for washing and reuse, apart from Coke bottles for obvious reasons. Though these days most of the bottles are still plastic, but are still largely recycled - even if the energy savings isn't all that huge, it still saves a lot of landfill space.
- LeonidasXIV 13y ago
  In Germany shopw have to charge you 25 eurocent when you buy a plastic bottle which they will return when you bring the bottle back. No such thing exists for glass bottles but they do get recycled. There are even separate recycle bins for white, brown and green glass. Yes, germans take trash separation seriously (on a related note, people in Japan too).
  - Samuel_Michon 13y ago
    I think you’re missing the point. It’s ‘reusing’ versus ’recycling’. When you throw bottles in a recycling bin, you can’t reuse them because they’re broken. It then takes a lot of energy to turn them into new bottles. It’s a lot better to keep the bottles intact, clean them, and fill them again. That’s what a few countries have chosen to do. The way it’s done in Germany is unfortunately a lot more common.
    - LeonidasXIV 13y ago
      Actually, Germany does both. The 25ct thing is a more recent development.
  - rmk2 13y ago
    These things certainly do exist. Everything that you buy per crate is usually returned as a a crate with empty bottles again. Case in point: beer bottles. Depending on brewery and type of bottle, I used to get beer that had the name of another beer printed on the (non-removable) snap-lock cap[1]. The same goes for a variety of other glass bottles. They are simply washed out (usually chemically), refilled, a new printed label is put on, a cap put on, done. [1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCgelverschluss https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCgelverschluss
    - LeonidasXIV 13y ago
      You're right, I have no idea how I forgot about this. Shame on me.
  - 13y ago

ars 13y ago

This sounds great, but would actually hurt the environment, not help it. Of all the things on this earth to recycle, glass is the very last one. The planet (the crust anyway) is basically made of glass. (60.2% of the earth's surface, by mass, is glass.) It's, by far, the most plentiful raw element there is. Next closest is alumina at 15.2%. Recycle it for some energy savings? Sure. But if you are going to waste water, and heat, for it you are really doing exactly the opposite of saving energy - not only are you wasting energy, you are wasting water, and time. Pretty much the only things worth recycling are metals.

kragen 13y ago
Glass is not an element. Neither is alumina; alumina is a compound of two elements, aluminum and oxygen. Glass is a kind of solid which can be made of virtually any substance, including water, steel, and alumina. Very little of the earth's surface is actually made of glass (although some is: pumice and obsidian are glasses) but all of it could be made into glass. It's true that every recycling process uses energy and other resources. That's why the first choice is "reduce" — read your neighbor's newspaper instead of just sending it off to be pulped. The question is how much energy you're using, and how much the alternative non-recycling process would use. If you're comparing heating a bottle from 20° to 73° to sterilize it and heating it to 1400° to melt it, you will find that melting it uses, unsurprisingly, about 30 times as much energy as sterilizing it. It's going to take a heck of a lot of water desalination to make up for that much energy.
- ars 13y ago
  (When I said element I didn't mean it in it's chemical sense, but rather in the composition sense.) Glass is SiO2, and that is what the crust of the earth is made of. It's not amorphous, but that doesn't make any difference. To sterilize a bottle using water you have to heat water, not just glass. Water takes a huge amount of energy to heat. Your calculations are not as straightforward as you think. Plus heating something at home to sterilize it is not anywhere near as efficient as doing it in bulk. To melt glass takes 984.2 J/g. A glass bottle weights about 200g. So about 200kJ. That much energy will raise about 1kg of water 50 degrees. 1kg of water is about 1 liter. 1 liter of water is not enough to sterilize a glass bottle unless you had a perfectly shaped container to hold it. So final result: melting the glass uses less energy than sterilizing it. Plus no water. Plus the glass plant can probably recover most of the waste heat. Plus no need to wash the bottle. Plus no need to sort and transport to the original location. And now you know why almost no one does it: It's a bad idea.

tirant 13y ago

In the Netherlands glass bottle and plastic bottles,cost between 0.25€ and 0.50€ more, money you get back when you return them to the store. As a consequence of reciclying, the beer is usually cheaper when bought in glass bottles and beer crates (0.20€ - 0.30€ per 0.3L bottles) thus people usually buy those. It's a win-win situation for everyone :)

Samuel_Michon 13y ago
Only beer bottles carry a deposit (€0.10), all other glass bottles are to be disposed of in glass recycling containers (and doing so breaks the bottles). Beer bottles are the only ones being reused, not recycled. Although surrounding countries use a deposit system for aluminum cans to combat litter, the Netherlands does not. Also, even though PET bottles carry a deposit (€0.25), relatively few of the bottles that are returned are actually used to create new bottles. For instance, a Coca Cola PET bottle consists of just 25% recycled plastic. Lastly, starting in 2015 PET bottles sold in the Netherlands will not carry a deposit. Next year, PET bottle collection will move from store level to the municipal level.