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Comment by ewams | Hacker News Reader

For sure, my area doesn't allow glass or paper and there's some weird thing about cardboard, has to be brown or white only or something like that. So we recycle plastics (you can do numbers 1-5 now!) and brown cardboard in the provided bins and take glass, paper and other cardboard to a recycle center once a month. My previous home allowed glass, plastics (1-2 only), cardboard (anything unless it had food pieces on it), and paper; it was about 6 miles from current home. Just different county.

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Officially our recycling program takes a lot of surprising stuff, including wax cartons, all types of plastic, and even pizza boxes; glass and metal, too, of course. But no plastic bags and no styrofoam!

Unofficially, though, they only want plastics 1 & 2 and very clean cardboard and paper, if even that. And the metal, but probably not the glass. The thing is that around here the same folks who handle the landfills also handle the recycling, and they will take whatever they can get for free (no money changes hands) if they think they can monetize it - a situation which seems to change on a daily basis. I suspect that an awful lot of what we think we "recycle" around here actually ends up in one of their landfills instead.

its sort of worse than that, a lot of these recycling programs that local councils start running are in fact just rubbish offshoring.

They do deals with big Chinese companies to send recyclables to china to be recycled. Three big problems with this:

1) the climate impact of actually shipping this stuff over seas is huge.

2) There is no oversight on how these companies behave, there has been numerous reports of them NOT recycling at all and many reports of slave labour being used to "sift" the rubbish

3) China is now clamping down on it, they no longer want the rubbish, many councils have no backup plan for this eventuality and yes its likely to head to infill.

In our case we're too centrally located to make shipping stuff offshore economically viable, unlike say the coastal cities. But around here we do have plenty of cheap land available for landfill space, so that's where a lot of our stuff probably ends up. I know that our local recycler does feel at least some of the effects of the Chinese situation, though, and while it hasn't happened yet I fully expect that sometime soon they will be making changes to our current recycling system.

For glass it only ever made sense to reuse it, like cleaning and filling bottles. Otherwise, glass is so cheap and easy to make that recycling makes no sense. It takes just as much energy to melt old glass for recycling as it is to melt sand down for new glass, and the sand is going to come in cleaner and with less contaminates than used glass.

It's not true. Melting of crystals needs about 1/3 more energy and time, and higher temperature, than softening of recycled glass.

http://www.climatetechwiki.org/technology/glass

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