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Comment by malfist | Hacker News Reader

Glass is awful for recycling. It takes nearly as much energy to recycle as it does to make new. And it's raw materials aren't rare

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Glass containers are great for reuse though. For years beer, soda, and milk bottles used to be returned washed and reused. You don't need to melt them down and remold them.

Reduce Reuse Recycle in that order. Big plastic really wants you to ignore the first two.

I love that in Germany it's still fairly normal to get drinks in obviously reused bottles. Very rare most other places these days.

It has led to massive uptake of single use containers. I believe as of this year the German regime felt it necessary to levy an additional tax on these because the people are rejecting schlepping their containers back and forth.

Probably uses less energy to toss them and manufacture new ones close to the filling source.

…sigh… No.

Basic physics says otherwise. A commercial bottles washer sterilizes and cleans with water at about 140°F for about 15 minutes. While glass melts (depending on the type) between 2500°F and 3000°F. Then after that the newly formed glass needs to be kept in a annealing oven as it cools slowly from 1000°F to 600°F. the amount of energy needed is several orders of magnitude higher. also this doesn't mention the work needed to grind the glass to be melted, or the cleaning of the glass that still needs to be done so as not to introduce impurities to the glass your making.

Right but imagine that millions of people have to transport bottles to thousands of retail locations. Those need to be sorted and picked up and send to many locations to be cleaned, inspected, relabeled and filled. If it were centralized that’s one thing. But every company that makes drinks will need to collect their bottles.

We had that solved by people laying down a deposit with their initial purchase, and would then exchange their empties for full bottles at the point of sale. The same trucks that delivered full beer/soda/ect bottles can return with the empties back to the distribution center and another truck take them back to the bottler on the return trip. Those trucks all have to go back anyway so its not an additional burden.

>Reduce Reuse Recycle in that order. Big plastic really wants you to ignore the first two.

I really miss this marketing. It made so much more sense than what is happening today.

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