Glass jars/bottles and metal cans are great for recycling (sometimes even reuse if standards are high enough).
Paper bags are also a great technology.
I could see a standardized beverage container format (including a paper wrapper lightly glued on) and cheap reusable metal 'silverware' that is also magnetic (because we're a nation of idiots and this stuff is going to get in to the waste stream) working out.
It's literally better to NOT recycle glass than to recycle it. Reuse it.
You don't want to BREAK the glass bottles, since they still need to be sorted, and cleaned.
I am far from an expert, but here in germany glas gets recycled in 3 bins, brown, green, white - and get usually smashed by people throwing those bottles in. So not much air. And cleaned they still can get (and should)
Here in Boulder, CO, USA, recycling goes only into one bin. It then needs to get sorted at the recycling center. We're told not to smash bottles. Glass has to first be sorted by color.
The actual sorting step scans each small piece of glass cullet individually, and air jets kick different types into different outlets. This is very fast - 30 metric tons an hour.
Is the final cost lower just because landfills and sand are everywhere, but recycling facilities are farther away?
What's more dense in material: a 10" by 4' by 4' pallet of old jugs, or a 10" by 4' by 4' pallet of sand?
I'm saying the latter - we're essentially shipping air as the majority of the material. So, more trucks need to ship the same amount of material.
That's just one example.
The economics of all this is very geographically dependent.
In many parts of the country, the transport cost isn't a big deal because there are glass manufacturers who use cullet nearby. It's not clearly superior to transport glass to a landfill instead of a place that can recycle it.
Glass recycling isn't economical enough to reuse brown bottles in Montana? Understandable - so it's not collected.
Saying that glass recycling is economically and ecologically unsustainable everywhere is a bold statement.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/29/the-world-is-r...
http://www.businessinsider.com/world-running-out-sand-resour...
It doesn't go on to why that is, but the conclusion is that recyclable glass won't work(?).
But if you want to make pure boro-silicate glass, you cannot tolerate much contamination of oxides, lime, lead, dolomite, salt, etc. or your glass will be tinted, full of bubbles, and possibly even cracks while cooling.
Even with the recycling system in Germany where you separate glass by color, people will not distinguish a soda-lime, boro-silicate, or lead glass. And I don't know a process that could extract the pure SiO2 from old glass (though I'd love for someone to jump in and tell me about a cheap method)