Hacker News Reader

Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

Not glass. Yes metal.

Glass is so worthless for recycling, all they do with it is crush it and use it to cover landfill each night to keep down rodents and dust. That's considered "recycled".

> As for an honest society, do you have some historical reference point, or are you just aiming for utopia?

For some reason greenwashing is really prevalent among people who should know better (policy makers, scientists, environmentalists). And regular people desperately want recycling to be a real thing so that they feel better about themself.

It's a perfect match, leading to the situation we have now.

View on HN

No, glass is definitely recycled in the true sense at least some of the time. The key word to look for when researching this is "cullet": crushed glass used as a furnace input.

e.g. Here, http://uk.saint-gobain-glass.com/trade-customers/float-glass... : "SGG UK also utilises, on average, 30% recycled glass (cullet) in the batch, which has the additional benefit of lowering the melting point of the batch, resulting in a more efficient process."

A discussion of the problem of having too much of the wrong colour glass in UK wine bottles: https://www.glass-ts.com/userfiles/files/2005%20-%20WRAP%20-...

Broken glass may be essentially worthless, but intact bottles can be cleaned and refilled. Since that actually happens, I imagine the logistics involved to be somewhat cost-effective compared to making new glass (or maybe it's all fueled by subsidies).

> but intact bottles can be cleaned and refilled

Only a very small percent of them. You are probably thinking of soda bottles, and yes, they used to do that. But today it's plastic bottles (and I'm glad for it!). Milk in glass bottles is all but dead.

Most glass these days is jars for olives, and salsa, and tomato sauce, and other random things, where there is just not scale to collect them. It's not anymore all uniform, every jar is a difference size.

Beer from the very largest companies might still work, although I think it's mostly cans now. But there are a lot of small producers, and routing the glass back to them would be too expensive.

We haven't even touched on how there is basically no point in doing it anyway. The entire crust of the planet is basically made of glass. We can't run out without dismantling (discrusting? :) the planet. It's also harmless to dispose of, just crush it first.

Recycle metal, burn plastic and paper (for energy!! not for disposal!!), crush and landfill glass and other organics. Those are the most environmentally friendly options.

It takes far more energy to make new glass than to clean and reuse old glass. Even melting existing glass is valuable, as it lowers the melting point of the raw materials and therefore energy expenditure. Until glass manufacture uses solar or wind or something similar, it’s an issue.

The problem isn’t a lack of silica, it’s yet more waste of energy and pollution purely screwing is over.

Glass can only be recycled so many times and then it is worthless as you say. Value depends on the quality, color, and clarity of the glass. Given that cullet is necessary to make new glass, there is always a market for it. Best of all though, bottles can be cleaned and reused many times for a fraction of the energy cost of making new ones.

There are a lot of subtleties to recycling, some in favor generally, environmentally, and economically... some not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com