Comment by wffurr
4 hours ago
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.
4 hours ago
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.
Yeah it is very cheap and viable to wash/reuse bottles, but this requires special handling and isn't compatible with the single-stream systems widely used in the US.
In the US we throw everything into a truck and we expect recyclers to sort and re-melt a bunch of broken shards of assorted glass.