Hacker News Reader

Comment by michael_nielsen | Hacker News Reader

This article buries an important story beneath bombast. A much better read is David MacKay's (free) book "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air": http://www.withouthotair.com/ As the book itself says, it's an analysis of sustainable energy based on "numbers not adjectives".

View on HN

That's an excellent book. I have a paper copy of it. While the article is right about cellphone chargers things like this lack some context:

    Glass requires so much energy to make - or recycle - that it is
    always more eco-friendly to use aluminium cans

Firstly, that depends on how you recycle things. Perhaps in the UK they melt down their glass and make it anew, but in some other countries such as Denmark they'll actually use the same bottle again after cleaning it out.

If you buy a soft drink in a class bottle in Denmark you'll get a container that looks like it's seen war.

Secondly, it's presuming that pounds sterling is the best way to measure sustainability, and that just because something costs more now it's less sustainable in the long run.

Which is just patently silly. We basically have infinite energy on this planet as long as the sun keeps shining, but we don't have infinite easily accessible aluminum.

In the future access to basic material resources is going to be a lot more important than whether someone expended a few extra joules back in 2010.

We have infinite energy, but not infinite accessible energy. It takes millions of years for those rays of sunshine to get neatly packaged into oil and coal, which are honestly still our best ways of extracting energy.

is the aluminum going somewhere? we're mooshing it around into different shapes, and drawing pictures on it, but it's still aluminum which has had inconvenient impurities removed. if you're telling me we've got infinite energy, then what's the problem with mining through landfills to extract the useful stuff?

if we've got infinite energy, then the problem will be when we want to have more aluminum in use at one time than we've got, total.

If we had infinite energy we could make more aluminium.

I didn’t know that there are places on the world where glass bottles are not used several times. Even some PET bottles are used several times in Germany. I’m drinking Coke out of one of those right now. You can even crudely gauge how often one has been used by how clear it is. (Mine looks pretty new.)

Wikipedia tells me that those PET bottles are used about twenty times (and then they are recycled). They were introduced in Germany in 1990 by Coca Cola.

Where I live in the US, there is no bottle reuse, as far as I know. In fact, while we have recycling pickup, the city will not pickup glass at all because it is considered too dangerous for the workers. If you want to recycle glass, you have to take it yourself to a recycling center.

In the past (30+ years ago?) glass bottles were routinely reused before plastic and aluminum containers were widespread.

In general all of the schemes for recycling and bottle reuse vary by state and city in the US.

Now that I think of it, there are glass bottles in Germany which are not reused, wine and liquor. Actually those are the only two next to beer which still commonly use glass bottles. Everything else is pretty much PET, nowadays probably already mostly not reusable (despite a mandatory deposit for all bottles, no matter if reusable or not). It will be very hard for you to find anyone selling aluminum cans, though.

The only place I've seen reusable plastic bottles has been in Germany. Are they used elsewhere in Europe?

Also, it seems that most of the drink cans I've seen in Germany are steel rather than aluminum.

I have also only seen reusable PET bottles in Germany, but haven’t looked very closely elsewhere in Europe.

You are right about the cans as I just learned. I always just assumed that every can is a aluminum can but Wikipedia tells me that tin cans are also common. I honestly wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. (Wikipedia illustrates its article about cans with two tin cans [1]. If you had asked me what material they were made of without showing me the caption I would have told you aluminum. Clearly visible FE in a circle be damned.)

Another interesting tidbit from that Wikipedia article: cans might be on the rise again in Germany. 700 million were sold in 2009 (a bit less than 9 per person), 1 billion is the projection for 2010 (a bit more than 12 per person). The US number for 2009 seems to be 96 billion [2], that’s about 320 per person.

[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Getraenkedos...

[2] http://www.cancentral.com/members/pdf/CMI2009AnnualReport.pd... (PDF)

Most of the plastic bottles sold in Finland were reusable up until 2008 or so, but now that the tax levied on non-reusable containers has been removed, most of the bottles appear to be of single-use variety.

According to PALPA, those single-use bottles do get returned (89%) nearly as well as the sturdier ones did. They just aren't reused as such but in production of plastics.

Finnish numbers:

Aluminum cans: 92% recycled (Germany 96%, Belgium 93%)

Glass bottles: nearly 100%

Plastic bottles: 89%

To reuse a aluminum soda can you need only 5% of the energy used to make the can.

97% of beverage bottles are recycled in Finland. Glass bottle gets reused on average 33 times.

Finland seems to be the world leader in this area.

Joining the Finnish beverage recycling scheme is very expensive. The industries own PALPA. If you want to join, you'll have to pay upfront your share of the investment expenses which the other have paid previously. The bottle stock is also very expensive. Materials plus 0,20€ per 0,33-0,5 litre bottle, 0,40€ for 1-2 litre bottle or 0,15€ per aluminum can. For example the German retail giant Lidl chose not to join this scheme. They do recycle their own bottles, but you can't return their bottles anywhere else.

cans make some kind of comeback. thez were always there for energy drinks (red bull etc) and beer (5,0 , holsten..) and i see them more and more (in small quantities) for coke/pepsi etc.

> If you buy a soft drink in a class bottle in Denmark you'll get a container that looks like it's seen war.

Here in Argentina, there are returnable glass bottles, non-returnable glass bottles, returnable PET bottles, and non-returnable PET bottles.

> Which is just patently silly. We basically have infinite energy on this planet as long as the sun keeps shining, but we don't have infinite easily accessible aluminum.

Aluminum makes up 8% by weight of the Earth's crust, according to https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Abundance_of_...

If the crust is 0.4% of the mass of the Earth, then aluminum comprises about 2 × 10¹⁸ tons. Current annual production, which is limited by energy availability, is about 30 million tons. At the current rate of production, we would run out of crustal aluminum in 70 billion years if we didn't recycle any of it.

You can make glass out of silica, although typical glass contains sodium oxide and some other common minerals to make it easy to work with. So we aren't going to run out of raw materials for glass soon.

There are basic material resources that are in short supply, and which in the future will have to come from mining landfills. Aluminum, however, is at the other end of the scale.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com