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Comment by acomjean | Hacker News Reader

There is an energy saving component to recycling. Aluminum for example takes a tremendous amount of power to produce and recycling reduces that.

Recycling makes different amounts of sense depending on the material. I suspect that a fair amount of material mined is subsidized by different governments (natural resource extraction at least in the us often takes place on leased government land).

I did some landfill design engineering in a previous career. while there is lots of space sometimes it’s far away, so there is trucking waste around. Plus landfills despite their liners and clay layers can leak nasty stuff into the groundwater.

You pay for what you put in the landfill by weight, so reducing waste can save municipalities money.

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> There is an energy saving component to recycling. Aluminum for example takes a tremendous amount of power to produce and recycling reduces that.

Yes, that’s why aluminium is recycled everywhere. Glass, on the other hand, is more of a “What the hell do we do with this?” situation because making glass from sand is cheap and doesn’t have the quality control issues of making it from old glass. That’s why recycled glass goes to making gravel, decorative or not, mostly.

Transport is cheap and most recycling makes no economic sense and wouldn’t even with a carbon tax. Chemical feedstock is cheap, wood is cheap, metals are cheap. That covers plastics, paper and manufactured goods. Recycling is a religious impulse, not an economic one.

> Transport is cheap

only because heavy goods vehicles do not pay for the damage that they do to the roads and the environment and because the oil industry is effectively subsidised.

> Glass, on the other hand, is more of a “What the hell do we do with this?” situation because making glass from sand is cheap [...]

What about the sand shortage? [1] [2] [3]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/07/21/538472671/world-faces-global-...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/global-sand-shortage-could-c...

[3] https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2017/04/24/...

The shortage is for beach sand. I believe glass is made from different sort of sand.

I like the German solution for dealing with glass bottles: rather than recycling, they are made to be washed and reused.

You pay a deposit when you buy a bottle of tasty beverage, and some time later, can take those bottles back to the grocery store. There, you put your used bottles into a machine which scans each bottle, and gives you an aggregate receipt for all of the bottles you returned, which you can then use to buy goods at that store.

It's a great system for encouraging reuse, and we should be doing this in the US.

Most states already have a refundable deposit on recyclable containers.

In practice, it functions as a tax on recyclable containers: most individuals don't reclaim the deposit unless they're harvesting cans in bulk.

"Most states already have a refundable deposit on recyclable containers."

That's kind of a nebulous statement, but within the OP's context; there's only 10 states that have bottle deposits. I've never personally seen a can deposit; usually the money made from collecting cans is from their scrap weight value, not any kind of deposit.

Are there other container deposits I'm unaware of in the states?

Most (all?) states with bottle deposits also charge that on cans of soda/beer as well.

You are absolutely correct; there are can deposits in those same ten states. Thank you for pointing that out.

While I like it too, it has some issues in practice, the biggest being that it works best with standardization: E.g. there's a few common types of beer bottle, and the idea is that you can ship bottles to whatever is the closest brewery that needs bottles and they can use them. That of course breaks down if breweries do their own, custom bottles, because now you have to filter those out and ship them to their specific brewery, which a) increases processing effort and b) means shipping empty bottles over longer distances (and in the US, the distances would potentially be way larger than in Germany).

Does the world really need custom bottles though? At some points society should put its foot down and say that corporations should not be able to do anything they want without regard to the environment.

It's also a great example of a coordination problem: while I'm sure no company wants to stick its neck out to become the boring bottle company, they would benefit if all companies had to standardise on bottle shapes.

If I remember correctly it was the other way around here: Basically everyone used the same bottle shapes and it worked fine, and then companies started going "hey, our branding people would really like a fancy bottle for this new product", and the setup of the entire return network wasn't done in a way that strongly-enough discouraged that. (Also a scale thing: a large brewery can afford the one-time expense of buying a big machine that can sort through tons of bottles by shape, smaller ones need to do it by hand or with simpler equipment)

Standardizing containers (not just bottles) brings a number of improvements not just for recycling but for general logistics. It's one of those things that no one is large enough to implement on their own but once it's done everyone benefits.

>everyone benefits //

I'd expect it's detrimental to incumbents (who hold the most market power and so can block it).

It's worth considering how the entire supply chain used to work.

In days of yore, soft drink bottling plants were in every small town. They were locally owned, were good citizens and local suppliers of jobs, sponsored sports teams.

Distributors used to pick up bottles sorted for their bottlers and then put them in a great big bottle yard for further hand sorting (don't ask me how I know).

Beer, while they mostly used brown bottles (Miller for one excepted), also was much more locally sourced although not as locally.

In the meantime, there was huge consolidation in beer manufacturing, huge consolidation in distribution (with the inevitable forced closure of family-owned businesses, not dissimilar to car dealerships), similar consolidation in soft drink manufacture. The whole underlying network changed in the interest of efficiency/profit maximization for the corporate motherships.

tl;dr You simply can't just declare reuse of bottles and be done with it. There's a whole ecosystem.

The catch with glass bottles is that they are quite heavy compared to plastic bottles and you have to ship a lot of empty volume around when returning them to be washed and filled.

I remember that there was a brief discussion once that moving the empty glass bottles might be so energy inefficient that using recyclable plastic bottles would make more sense. These kinds of soft plastic bottles are crushed immediately after taken in by the machine and thus take up much less volume on their return trip (fewer trucks with better loads). I unfortunately don't know if this claim was finally determined to be true or false.

The real reason is marketing. Otherwise stores would just have huge tubs of different goods, and you'd fill a standard size bottle/jar, then take the goods away, then bring those standardised containers back and keep doing that until the containers wear out. If you're wealthier, the store would do the washing and refilling.

French supermarkets used to do that with the cheap wine. You used to get "container" or "tub" stores in the 80s (UK) that you could buy loose product and put in your own containers.

This, to me seems a better, more responsible way to do things but it means reducing the numbers of products (only 3 types of extra-virgin olive oil, how will we survive!) and removing marketing opportunities like package labelling and shape. Companies couldn't just reduce the volume of a good in a packet when prices go up nor redesign the label to hide what is [not] inside.

It would be interesting to see how companies would innovate differentiation if, for example, all mobile phones came in a fixed size/shape box that couldn't use mixed media, could only use environmentally friendly dyes in the printing.

I would be generally in favor of reusable packaging for comsumables (not just food, but also soap, detergents, ...). Also, I often stare into supermarket shelves in dismay because some perishable items are sold in fixed container sizes far bigger than what I can comsume before it spoils.

But I don't get why you would have to reduce the variety of product brands to get there. Care to elaborate?

Edit: I have seen repeated news of tub stores opening up in Germany. They are very few and far inbetween, but the the that exist seem to do reasonably well.

> I would be generally in favor of reusable packaging for comsumables (not just food, but also soap, detergents, ...).

There's an effort to do this by TerraCycle and some big name corporate partners like PepsiCo, Unilever, Proctor & Gamble, etc.

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/24/18196388/unilever-pe...

> I have seen repeated news of tub stores opening up in Germany. They are very few and far inbetween

Quite common in Canada, eg: http://www.bulkbarn.ca

I do wish they'd catch on more in Europe.

Makes sense until you look at the energy intensity of plastic bottle recycling. The most surprising part is discovering the washing stage of recycling is far more intense than for reuse. It's trying to wash and agitate the glue, ink and labels from the outside, not just dried remnants of drink or food.

A truck has to go back to the factory with plastic pellets, and to collect the product, so you're only left with the weight differential. Given the amount of corporate lobbying and marketing pushing away from reuse and towards recycling I think it likely that reuse is the winner in terms of sustainability. Recycling is an externality creation exercise to reduce costs for the business, not overall.

We used to do this extensively in Norway, even with plastic bottles. But it has recently been shut down.

We've moved to use more aluminum and thinner plastic bottles, because they can be crushed at the recycling point (look up Tomra recycling machines), making it much more space efficient. Remember that the trucks transporting the bottles back to the plant have their emissions as well (for now at least). Transporting uncrushed empty bottles is inefficient too.

This seems to be much better on multiple levels. It seems that many more smaller companies are on board with this recycling scheme than the re-use scheme, since re-use means that ever producer of bottled items have to agree on a very limited set of bottle sizes, and be able to handle all the logistics of accepting those bottles back.

The recycling of plastic bottles in Norway is one of the most successful recycling schemes for plastic, since you get a stream of plastics of a single type. Most other recycling of plastic is worthless because you get a mix of different plastics.

>aluminum and thinner plastic bottles [...] can be crushed

These schemes are common in Germany as well, often side by side with the glass bottles. But cans really only come in single serving sizes, and some people are wary about plastic bottles.

> and some people are wary about plastic bottles

Are people worried about potential health effects of plastic leaching into the contents, or something else?

Yes, originally mostly concerns about Bisphenol A [1], later also it's substitutes. That, plus the more recent reports about microplastic pollution [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#Health_effects

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics

I just moved to germany and routinely people in my local super market come with a few dozen empty plastic bottle for the crusher, maybe it is a regional thing (saarland here)

Are you sure they are efficiently reused, and not just faux-recycled as discussed in this thread, subsidized by the taxpayers on the back end? That's the concern parent is raising.

Beer bottles in Brazil are the same for all brands, and for a long time all marketing was done solely on the label, not in the bottle itself.

Glass depends on the Country, Germany is small and we do not have Tons of quartz sand available

The whole point of the EU is not to depend on the country. The EU is most of a continent, I’m sure it has ample sand and sandstone for making glass. German manufacture of cement isn’t much different from elsewhere, why would manufacture of glass be absent taxes and regulation?

well the altest reportage i've seen highlighted that germany recycles up to 50% of glas for newly made bottles. (glass bottles already get reused a lot anyway) quartz sand is available of course and we also import it, but it's actually not that cheap. in germany we have glas containers for old glas which a lot of people use, the reclycing facility only needs to filter out trash (which most often consists of metals) which is dirty simple. also it's cheaper to recycle glass. you still need high temperatures but since the glass tainted it will take way less heat (probably doesn't make that much of big difference, still above 2000 degree celsius, i think it's like 3% energy saving, but couldn't find too much articles that weren't behind closed doors). the glass still need to have a containment of a simple percentage, else it needs to be redone, but most of the time this is reached and the glass is still dirt cheap - the trash.

btw. recycling of glass isn't just done by germany. the whole eu recycles glass, with a rate of 74% (2013 data: https://feve.org/glass-recycling-hits-73-eu/, https://feve.org/recyclingstatistics2016/) (which is a lot, but not enough for some people) and as said it's mostly bottles: "An estimated 90% of what is collected goes into creating new bottles from old ones"

Making glass from glass isn't expensive either, kind of similar to how you'd make glass from sand: you melt it. The government needs to set the right incentives, though. Recycling of one-time use glass works quite well in Germany.

If you use industrial feedstock of known characteristics quality control is much easier than if you use glass that might include window glass, coloured glass of a colour you don’t want, random chips of ceramic, etc.

Recycling of one time glass doesn’t work that well in Germany, look at wine bottles. What works well is reuse of bottles, both glass and plastic, and having big deposits on bottles, big enough that people are motivated to bring them back to the store to redeem the deposit.

> There is an energy saving component to recycling. Aluminum for example takes a tremendous amount of power to produce and recycling reduces that.

It's also basically one of the only things you will get paid for recycling (copper being the other notable exception; scrap steel is mostly worthless unless you have a ton of it).

No one wants to pay you for used plastic or paper. That alone should tell us all about the economics of recycling.

It should also tell a lot about the negative externalities of plastic not being priced into it.

> No one wants to pay you for used plastic or paper.

In Europe at least, people do want to pay you for used paper, and enough money that some marginal social groups specialize in collecting waste cardboard from businesses.

> Aluminum for example...

What I've heard is that Aluminum is, by far, the only material it makes sense to recycle.

Which, if true, means it's less of an example and more of an exception. Though an important one.

PE, PP, PET and 1st grade paper/cardboard also makes sense to recycle.

Wouldn't you just make landfills hotspots for mining once the economics make sense for things like metals?

Isn't it better economically not to bury the stuff in the ground and then dig it up?

Depends on the logistical costs. But I agree, it's kinda like a broken window thing.

People always mention Aluminum when it comes to recycling, but Aluminum is the best of all the materials.

The vast majority of material is not like that though.

In summary: Recycle metal, not anything else.

And even with aluminum, there are different alloys, and you can't necessarily mix them when recycling.

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