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Comment by jojo14 | Hacker News Reader

From design point of view this is cool. However it is just a lame PR story. First glass is one of the rare materials that is nearly 100% recyclable it would be a shame to sore it as construction material. Second beer vendors way prefer aluminum which is way toxic for the environment but also remarkably recyclable. The best materials are those not produced furthermore those not littered. Why Heineken just don't fund garbage collector in such areas ? Why not an incentive when people return used bottles or others wastes ?

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As is taught in schools, we first reduce, then reuse and only then recycle, in that order. Here we are already giving emphasis to reuse, but it is better than just recycling.

Had a teacher come up with Repair to add to those. You could see the pride on her face the day she brought it up, as if she’d unearthed the secret that would solve global waste.

I guess you could add Return to that list as well, although more likely to be applied to clothing than alcohol sales.

A lot of returned items are simply destroyed. Or in the best case resold. So instead of returning you could Resell them, but that's basically the same as Reuse.

>Why not an incentive when people return used bottles or others wastes ?

Some countries do that. Notably Finland and Sweden. When you buy a can of coke, or a glass bottle of beer, there is a small surcharge added to the price. When you return the empty container you receive your money back.

People discard cans/bottles in parks, at bus-stops, and people make a living collecting them and claiming the money back.

https://www.sitra.fi/en/cases/deposit-based-recycling-system...

In Poland (perhaps all of the Soviet bloc?) it’s always been a thing. I remember collecting them as a kid, competing against local drunks. It was hard to find one back then. These days they’re too cheap for most people to care.

Also, Poland has a huge share of bottles that are not returnable, which is very different from Germany or the Nordics where all the bottles have deposit on them, even plastic ones.

(Whether you are able to return them is a different question, because the Danish system allows vendors to reject bottles that they aren't selling themselves, which is something Germany was quick to outlaw)

Also Norway. Typically close to 10 percent of the purchase price is a returnable deposit.

A few cans and bottles are discarded but the vast majority are returned because it is so easy to do; almost every supermarket has a machine that accepts the bottles and cans (including those not sold in that shop), crushes them, and prints a ticket that you can redeem at the checkout.

Elsewhere there were privately-run bottle-deposit schemes until relatively recently. One was active in Scotland until only 2015: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-33985022.

I spent years collecting and returning those glass bottles, and to this day maintain that Irn-Bru tastes better from a glass bottle than a plastic one!

I had no idea the program had stopped, but I guess it must have been around the time I left Scotland.

Glass is literally made out of sand and recycling it doesn't even save a lot of energy. It's heavy to transport and you have to clean it and melt it again. Recycling it doesn't make a lot of sense.

Reusing glass bottles might make more sense, since you save the melting step.

You say it doesn't save "a lot" of energy, but it still saves energy. And you can do both, you can reuse until the bottle is in too bad condition, and then recycle.

Also, http://www.ferver.eu/en/node/31 disagrees with you that it's not "a lot".

Thanks for that link. I adjust my position on the amount of energy it saves, but I'd like to see an analysis that also includes transportation and cleaning.

Is there a source that's not literally the lobbying group for glass recyclers?

WRT transport - if you are not recycling glass (or reusing, repurposing), you are in effect moving mountains to local landfills?

I think recycling glass makes much more sense than throwing it away.

It was the 1960s/70s...

Recycling takes a lot of energy. If you can reuse instead of recycle, it might be better.

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