Hacker News Reader

Comment by dannyw | Hacker News Reader

Glass bottles are arguably worse for the environment.

More drink foundations where you bring your own bottle, and more convenient recycling options (smart bins everywhere that credit you 10c for every bottle you deposit... then raise this to 15c, 25c, etc).

View on HN

I imagine the 10c doesn't encourage as many people as a +1 public recycling score on one of your social media profiles would.

In Finland almost every single can, and drinks bottle, has a corresponding price printed on it, ranging from €0.10 to €0.25. You can return them at almost any local store and receive cash.

There are hundreds of unemployed/retired/homeless people who scour parks, and the city centers, collecting these discarded containers and recycling them for the money.

The return rate is pretty high, even with the tiny amount of money per-item.

Hey students looking for extra cash do this often too!!

Note that the "homeless" people in Finland are mainly people who refuse to accept support from the social welfare, this is because they prefer to get drunk instead of spending it on food and rent. The social welfare eventually suggests a different system for such people: pay the rent for them and give a special card that can be used for anything except alcohol and cigarette. If the people keep refusing that other option, then they went homeless on their own accord and keep spending the welfare on alcohol and living on the streets. Such people are very rare in Finland in reality however, but they do exist.

There is also one woman [1] who for whatever reason chooses to live homeless with bunch of luggage. She doesn't drink at all, and keeps moving from town to town with all her luggage, by walking.

Here's also a discussion about the Romanian beggars you see in Helsinki streets. [2]

1: https://shl.fi/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/IMG_2935.jpg

2: https://www.reddit.com/r/Finland/comments/79mqjs/question_ab...

I heard that too! How I wish that my country will do the same thing.

It's cheaper both economically and energy-efficent to just produce new glass bottles rather than to sort, clean, crush and melt old ones.

Why not clean then reuse the glass bottles (skipping crush, melt and fabricating)? This is what was done up until the 80s.

This is still done in Germany to a fairly large part, be it glass or reusable plastic bottles. An argument I've heard from the company producing one-time-plastic bottles for the Schwarz Group:

- Lots of chemistry and treatment is needed to clean used bottles. - It is logistically more efficient to crush one-time-plastic bottles instead of moving around trucks with plastic bottles or heavy glass bottles.

Logistically more efficient but what about the complete environmental impact? Are they also considering the costs of disposing of this plastic? Aren't trucks driving around empty half the time anyway? Can the grocery truck just haul empties back to the distribution center where they are handed back to the trucks from the manufacturer?

I just started getting glass milk bottles in the store here in Arkansas that I can return for a $2 deposit. Very happy about this and hope it becomes more popular (again, well not sure if the US ever did it).

That doesn’t take into account the economic costs Of a degraded environment or oceans gyres filled with plastic. It ignores the externalities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com