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Comment by liveoneggs | Hacker News Reader

recycling in the US has to be profitable. Where I live we are no longer allowed to put glass into the recycling because it is no longer a profit center for the city.

I should add that getting rid of big items can be especially difficult, but most appliance delivery includes taking away the old one to .. wherever they go.

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> to put glass into the recycling because it is no longer a profit center

And because recycling it is one of the most pointless things you can do. It's sand, we have unlimited quantities of it, the planet is made of it.

The right kind of sand for making glass isn't found everywhere. In the UK, we have a particular problem that the only glass-suitable sand we have is not suitable for making clear glass, so we can only make coloured glass. All our clear glass is imported, mostly from France. However, most local recycling centres only have a "mixed colours" glass bin, so we can't even make our own recycled clear glass. And That's Why We Can't Have Nice Things (tm).

The reason to recycle materials made of abundant elements (steel, aluminum, glass) is to conserve energy rather than ores. (Even the energy justification would be far less significant if world energy systems were mostly non-fossil.) Though city planners should do the arithmetic to double check that the collection system doesn't waste more resources than it saves.

Refining iron or aluminum from ore takes significant energy because you're basically un-rusting it, and that reaction naturally runs the other way; recycled metal gets to reuse that energy investment.

I thought the glass process was basically melting sand and adding some trace additives, rather than forcing any chemical reactions uphill. Recycled glass also needs melted (if it doesn't, that's called a reusable bottle, not recycling).

please read https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/01/magazine/sand-mining-indi...

This is incorrect. Making good glass is not trivial, glass has been recycled since Roman times. Even today, "Savings for other materials are lower but still substantial: about 70% for plastics, 60% for steel, 40% for paper and 30% for glass."

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