Comment by nozzlegear
5 hours ago
Slightly related, but my town has sent out several flyers recently chastising everyone for recycling things that aren't recyclable. If this overambitious recycling continues, the privilege of recycling itself shall be taken away. Unwanted elements include any kind of glass or glass bottle (my wife and I are guilty of recycling cleaned jars of spaghetti sauce); certain types of plastic; and pizza boxes that are "too greasy" (unclear how greasy "too greasy" is).
IIRC any grease is considered a contaminate. So any cardboard with grease splotching should be discarded instead of recycled.
Interesting my municipality recycles glass, but like, why? Silica is the most common mineral in the crust, easily accessible almost everywhere, and recycling it takes as much energy if not more than just making new. It's not like aluminum or steel where there are significant energy savings to recycling vs mining and refining.
> it takes as much energy if not more than just making new.
It saves 30% of the energy inputs to reuse slightly contaminated glass, especially when done locally.
That's ignoring the energy inputs of mining and delivering the silica.
https://learn.sustainability-directory.com/learn/what-are-th...
> and recycling it takes as much energy if not more than just making new.
It's just melted, mixed and reused, AFAIK. We're recycling glass since forever (maybe mid 90s), and the recycling bins were put out by our national glassware company.
They even have a special line built with these, recycled glasses, which I don't remember the name. They also have a "upcycle" line where they repurpose their fine but not perfect items to other things. Both are excellent lines and are not more expensive than their usual wares.
> We're recycling glass since forever (maybe mid 90s)
Far, far earlier than the '90s. Glass has been regularly recycled from the early days of glassmaking itself. It's crushed up into "cullet" and mixed back in.
Glass is great for this because it doesn't degrade from being remelted and reformed, and using cullet reduces the cost of energy and new raw materials when making new glass.
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I've seen articles lately about the sand becoming harder (more expensive) to get. Even though it is abundant, it is not necessarily clean. It still needs to be refined similar to other raw ores. If the glass has already been made, I would expect the contaminants are easier to eliminate from crushing and melting it back down.
Talking out of my ass, but I think that's only for concrete right? Same reason saudi arabia imports sand for their construction projects.
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> Unwanted elements include any kind of glass or glass bottle
?? Isn't this one of the most recyclable materials there is? Even aluminum cans come with contaminants that can't be removed by the consumer.
Regardless, at least you can easily reuse glass jars for home use. I find they make excellent drinking glasses and the reusable lid is a nice perk.
> Isn't this one of the most recyclable materials there is
It is! ... if it's unbroken, sorted by type, and in a place where there's demand for it.
Unfortunately, those advantages are often compromised by the recycling pipeline itself. Bottles of different types are thrown into trucks, and become unsafe shards of glass that are unsafe to handle and difficult to sort by type. It quickly becomes more trouble than it is worth given that the alternative is sand.
That's what I thought as well! I was surprised, and a little bit annoyed, to learn that they would prefer we throw away anything glass rather than recycle it.
Only if there is a local glass processing facility + consumer (e.g. large brewery, etc) is it worthwhile.
It takes more energy and work to reuse glass than to just make new glass. Sand is abundant.
Recycled aluminum is much less energy intensive than new aluminum even with contaminants.
Glass is 30% cheaper to make from recycled glass.
But transport and sorting (glass is hard and sharp) eat into that margin, so presort
Is that true if the bottle is reused several times?
I know that in some places they standardize the glass beer bottles to one or two types and strongly encourage people to bring the bottles back to the same location that they get beer from.
This results in a circular supply chain that sees bottles sterilized and reused many times. The number I heard was an average of 8 uses on average before a bottle gets a chip in it that renders it unsuitable for reuse, and then it is recycled.
It seems to me that this tight distribution loop is a key part of successful reuse and recycling endeavours.
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At least pizza boxes can go in the yard waste bin to be taken to the industrial composter. My yard waste bin came with a sticker that actively encourages putting food soiled paper in it.
You say that like that's a thing available every where. it's not. I compost my lawn clippings and food scraps, but I don't go so far as to put in cardboard type stuff in there. As for the greasy parts, it's usually just the bottom, so I've ripped off the top for adding to recycle and trashed the greasy part. But even that's more than most people would be willing to do
if only I had one in my area... where they exist use them, but they don't exit in a lot of places.
Strange, ours explicitly called out pizza boxes as being recyclable. I wonder what the difference is.
But do they get recycled? Or do they get burnt or mixed in with useful material and shipped off to be thrown in a river in SEA?
Also, some of pizzas I get have a separate circle piece they sit on and the box doesn't get any grease on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishcycling
Some accounts I've seen emphasized the "don't check it, don't think about it, don't look bad, don't feel bad" performative and self-delusion aspects.
I only recently learned that term, but I used to do "wishcycling" myself years ago. I figured if I wasn't sure it could be recycled, they'd know for sure at the recycling plant and sort it out there.
I partly blame an old Discovery Channel episode I watched as a teenager (probably Dirty Jobs?), which highlighted a line of men standing in front of a conveyer belt at some kind of recycling or garbage plant, manually sorting things out of the waste by hand before the bulk of it got dumped into a huge vat of treatment water. The impression it left on me was that there's always a bunch of dudes at the conveyer belt who were going to check and make sure nothing unrecyclable went into the recycling process.