Glass is the hidden gem in a carbon-neutral future | Hacker News Reader

Glass is the hidden gem in a carbon-neutral future

nature.com

120 points_Microft141 comments

Here in Canada in my small province there had been a "can ban" for many decades. The ban was mainly to protect the jobs of local bottling plants although the reason was spun that it was to be green.

Then in May 2008 the ban ended. Up until then it was only glass even 750ml pop which seemed massive. Pepsi had twisted spiral 750ml bottles that seemed to weigh 10kg each.

When the can ban ended the 355ml pop bottles were replaced with plastic pop bottles but the plastic were 590ml. The 750ml glass disappeared and were replaced with 2 litre p[plastic bottles.

At my old work we had a pop machine in the lunch room it had glass bottles. It was obviously designed to have plastic bottles or cans. When the bottle fell it sounds like someone dropped a bag of hammers from two floor above you.

I observed how my co-workers who were used to drinking 355ml of pop now bought 590ml bottles of pop. The lunchroom fridge was stuffed with half drunk plastic bottles. Over the next few weeks there were fewer and fewer half bottles. Then eventually just a few half drunk 590ml pop bottles in the fridge. People unknowingly had trained themselves to drink nearly double the amount of pop.

I wish I had recorded it in more detail. It was a fascinating human behaviour event to observe.

I read about a study where people were given soup to eat, in various quantities, and some were given bowls rigged to be bottomless. In general, they ate until the bowls were empty - except for the bottomless bowls, where they'd eat far more than any of the other groups.

I'm drawing on a 15-20 year old memory, so that's IIRC.

This experiment was probably falsified. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/08/20/did-that-b...

I've heard the same about those studies. I've seen it described as three different sizes of popcorn tub or three sizes of plates. It made sense but it seems to be debunked or maybe the debunk story is not true either?

In my situation it was right before my eyes and quite obvious.

as a treat i will occasionally let my boys get a "mexican coke", which is coke from mexico that comes in a real glass bottle and has real sugar, rather than corn syrup

my oldest asked why, since it tastes so much better and feels so much nicer to hold glass, we don't have this style of coke here

well, son, we are too rich to afford that

These days, the story is a bit more complicated. Not all Mexican coke is made with sugar anymore[0]

> In 2013, a Mexican Coca-Cola bottler announced it would stop using cane sugar in favor of glucose-fructose syrup. It later clarified this change would not affect those bottles specifically exported to the United States as "Coca-Cola Nostalgia" products.

> A scientific analysis of Mexican Coke found no sucrose (standard sugar), but instead found total fructose and glucose levels similar to other soft drinks sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, though in different ratios.

The shift to plastic, as I understand, mostly has to do with freight economics: glass is heavier and more fragile.

Personally, I wouldn't mind a third alternate consumption model: fill your own container. Many places already have fountain drink machines. It's really not that big of a stretch to allow reusable bottles there

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Coke

> The shift to plastic, as I understand, mostly has to do with freight economics: glass is heavier and more fragile.

Having tried to do online pasta sauce, I can confirm glass is expensive to ship. 6 jars cost us $30USD to ship and some would break. We insured the shipment and made more on the broken reships than a normal sale.

Coke on Brazil has a returnable container. It's not glass though but a thick plastic. When you return it to the store you pay a lot less. Returnable glass bottles for beer are also predominant here. Logistically it makes sense because the trucks would return base empty otherwise.

What about a home carbonator and cola syrup?

How about not drinking pop? I know a "just change your behaviour" response isn't fashionable, but in the case of pop... it's a completely harmful and unnecessary product.

necessity is a wonderful sounding criteria when being applied to things you don’t care for, and ghastly when applied to things you enjoy.

we could sooner justify the elimination of all alcohol products on these grounds than soda. sugary beverages just have calories; alcohol has got the calories along with liver damage, alcoholism, drunk driving etc.

I'm not suggesting banning anything, or taking any position as to whether pop should or shouldn't be banned.

Also if horribly unhealthy sugary drinks were banned, who would sponsor professional sports? They’ve already banned the tobacco companies from sponsoring them like in the good old days.

How about enjoying life? I weigh in at a 130lbs at 5'9", and have the body and skin of a woman much younger. Moderation, not abstinence, is where the happiest life is.

You can smoke, do crack and do all sorts of provably harmful things in moderation too. I guess the question is whether all pleasurable things are pleasurable enough to justify the harm they cause. Maybe to you, pop is. I'd say that empirical evidence shows that pop is a clear negative to society, is a recent addition to human diet and isn't universally consumed (so isn't actually necessary to anyone's life), so it seems like it's not far fetched to believe that it's probably not a bad idea to write it off our lives.

Yea, that's kinda what free will is all about. I've made that decision. You're allowed to do whatever you want hun, but abstinence is a fools ideology. You have one life, and the end isn't the good bit.

What are you going to do when she asks for it back?

Lucky for me, I'm the sculpture and the sculptor.

edit: Disambiguated a word.

I love it, I don't like pop often, but I like soda water all of the time. And Pepsi came out with syrup for home use, so I just keep that in the cupboard and on weekends watching a movie or something, I'll throw in some syrup. Easy peasy, and I can make it as sweet as I want.

Try buying the syrup. Report back.

Google search turns up lots of results for "cola syrup"

Soda stream.

No matter how hard I try I cannot replicate the exact bubbles of big brands with Sodastream.

Also, unless I want to just make seltzer, I am stuck with their branded syrups that attempt to copy drinks like coke, sprite, dr.pepper and others. They are all terrible and produce soda on par but typically worse than dollar store brands. Combine this with the added cost of doing all this, makes the system uneconomical.

Finally, I know some will have qualms of supporting an Israeli company but this is much worse than that. This company has been mired in controversy for years first for operating a factory on settlement lands, mistreatment of the Palestinian workers, and finally after years of protests in UK and european countries, the closing of the factory and laying off all but 75 Palestinian workers who were then denied a permit to move to the new factory.

There has been so much back and forth that we don't even know the exact truth about what really happened. Some say the workers were treated very well. Others say that the workers feared doing anything to piss off the Israeli bosses who could easily just replace them.

Given that the product itself is not revolutionary it seems better to consider other brands such as Drinkmate.

I tried using a special bottle designed to circumvent their proprietary bottle system (SodaMod) but I found that it does not produce any better bubbles than the OEM sodastream bottles.

My next experiment will be to purchase an alternative system once my Sodastream runs out in the hopes that the mechanism to dispense the CO2 will be better in the new system. Other than that I am all out of ideas to replicate the great bubbles and taste that the OEM brands produce.

Actually I have read something about it but I can't find the source anymore. From memory : More than half of people tested in a blind test could not make any difference between mexican coke and regular coke. The fact that it uses (or used to , can't remember) saccharine instead of corn syrup does make much difference as both decompose in a mix of fructose and glucose. Mexican coke had a bit more fructose that glucose but both are very simple form of sugar and science has not been able to establish than one is better than the other for your health. It did establish that simple sugars are bad a bad diet though.

There was some humidity and the soluble coffe (from a popular brand) compacted in the glass canister, so after doing a little pick work I had the great idea of putting it in the microwave (to remove all the water and have a coffee powder again, Easy peasy).

To my surprise the result was worse, all melted into a sort of really sticky chocolate tar.

It seems that everything has sugar added currently.

If the big factor for you is sugar vs corn syrup, Pepsi has you covered year-round for some products with "Pepsi Throwback" and "Mountain Dew Throwback" though they may have changed the branding. The 12-can cases of them will have either a script-style logo or a retro design.

On a more seasonal basis I believe both Coke and Pepsi do "kosher for Passover" versions with cane sugar that may be available in your area.

> it tastes so much better

Disagree.

I know I'm in the minority, but I prefer the mouthfeel of corn syrup or artificial sweetener and I find that real sugar is way too sweet. I mean, I'll still drink it - I just think it's way overrated.

I wonder if I'll ever meet anyone who agrees.

It's the actual glass bottle that I prefer.

I also prefer drinking beer from a pop off bottle instead of a twist off. And either much more than a can.

The bottles you’re drinking out of may actually be reused too. We used to do the same thing in the US, but we shipped all of the equipment to Mexico when we ‘upgraded’ to plastic.

What are the arguments against all beverages using those standardized reusable beer bottles? Why melt down perfectly good glass when it can be safely reused a solid dozen times before finally being recycled?

I’m wondering how much glass bottles contribute to transportation-related emissions versus aluminum and plastic.

We have something like that in Germany. For consumption at home, mineral water or carbonated lemonade beverages are usually available in standardized bottles [0] and bottle crates [1] (which can be conveniently stacked). The bottles can be refilled up to 50 times until they need to be taken out of the cycle. You can usually return them at shops that sell them, even if you haven't bought them at this exact shop. There is a (small) deposit per bottle and crate that incentivizes returning them.

[0] (german) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normbrunnenflasche

[1] (german) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getr%C3%A4nkekiste

I liked this system a lot when I lived in Germany. Although living in a 4th floor apartment without an elevator, buying crates of heavy duty glass bottles was a bit of a drag compared with cans.

The bottles are great to drink out of though and, since they have real redeemable value, you don't see empty bottles littering the street.

There are companies like flaschenpost now that deliver the bottles and collect them when they’re empty.

Wie weist man wie viele Male eine Flasche schon genutzt wird?

Parent comment said: "How does one tell how often a bottle was used already?"

I don't think one can tell. How I would go about it: calculate the average number of reuse by knowing how many bottles my factory has filled and how many new bottles it needed to introduce/throw out for that. I would also sort out bottles only depending on wear and tear. As long as the bottle is good enough, reuse it one more time.

Where I live we had glass beverage bottles until 2008 it was common to see wear marks on the bottles. Both for beer and pop bottles it was obvious they weren't new some even had chips.

There are small bulges on the bottles which get worn away and allow making a rough estimate of uses. The german wikipedia link above has a a little bit more detailed explanation

I would assume there isn't a magic number which can't be exceeded, but something which can be observed usually happens around that time, i.e. the glass becomes visibly cloudy and it's undesirable to sell new product in them, as opposed to invisible cracks in carbon fiber composites which require ultrasound to detect.

Very interesting.

It was absolutely the same in Soviet Union.

I still remember formula from my childhood: 3 empty bottles (10 kopeks each) + 3 kopeks = 1 full bottle of lemonade (33 kopeks).

I think it was a good thing, less glass garbage at least.

> You usually return them at shops that sell them, even if you haven't bought them at this exact shop.

It seems that such things needs some central regulation, they did not survive in pure capitalism

Glass bottles were very common in Germany, as there was a standing threat that a punitive deposit on single-use bottles would be introduced if the fraction of drinks sold in reusable bottles dropped too low.

Once that happened (fraction dropped, punitive deposit was introduced, and thus the threat was gone), glass bottles mostly disappeared.

This strongly indicates that there is some factor that makes them undesirable. My guess would be that the reverse logistics are so expensive that it doesn't make economical sense, which is also a good hint that it may not make sense ecologically either. Because you save the production of the bottles, but now you have to transport the heavy glass, twice, for each drink sold.

None of those bottles disappeared. Beer, juices etc are still very commonly sold in reusable glass bottles that re returned. What happened is that the discounters found the new system with deposits on plastics very appealing because it fit into there logistics better than offering glass bottled drinks. Also the remaining the plastic bottles normalized there use similar to glass bottles because they perceived waste production from those bottles was gone.

I believe water for example was almost exclusively sold in glass bottles, and soft drinks were often sold in either glass or refillable PET.

While all of these still exist, the single use bottles became much more common for these use cases.

The only exception I can think of is beer and maybe some premium juices.

I think you’d have to measure that as calculating the total impact of each option is quite difficult to get accurate.

Additionally some of the costs may be externalized in the case of pollution or trash from single use bottles.

Glass and ceramic share something in common. When they are forged entirely of virgin material, they are more prone to deformation and stress fracturing. So you pulverize old pieces and add them into the mix prior to firing.

If it’s stronger, you can make it lighter and still meet safety margins. This makes preconsumer recycling virtually mandatory, and makes post consumer a more attractive option.

I can think of one - you do not know the heat/impact stress it has received when out of your custody, and don't want to be responsible for its unexpected shattering while your client is using it. Reforging adds some guarantees.

Milk bottles Of my youth and glass bottles of Scotland's famous Irn Bru seemed to survive without causing death and injury to everyone coming close to one.

I think you are being overly paranoid.

I mean, that you heard of? I'm not sure it's possible to know with certainty what the drawbacks of mass glass reuse are without trying it. Probably there won't be a major issue but these liability questions should probably be ironed out.

The bigger question to be is the relative current carbon intensity of reuse vs. disposable containers. Sure in a future where energy is generated without involving carbon, it may make sense to recycle glass more than we do today. But . . . that's the future state, not the state today.

The article says that in Europe over 50% of the mass of new glass is actually recycled glass already. For bottles, I think, the system we have in Germany proves that it can be done. The bottle type that I mentioned in another comment here already is being used for 50 years now and about 5 billion of these bottles were produced so far. I guess we have seen all of the problems already that could possibly arise from that.

Oh, I know that glass can be recycled. That is not a question to me. What I'm less sure about is whether it can reliably be recycled without being reforged. I'm also not sure whether glass recycling is much better on a net carbon front than manufacturing. I'm sure it saves the cost of silica mining, but then there is the cost of shipping the returns and getting rid of impurities . . . it would be an interesting thing to know.

Norway had reuse of glass bottles for decades. The pressure to switch to plastic came entirely from the drinks manufacturers over cost. Safety was never an issue.

Cost is often a proxy for energy expenditure, though. That's what I'm getting at. It is not obvious to me that reusing a glass bottle will necessarily decrease net energy expenditure.

It could also be that it is a proxy for energy expenditure by the manufacturers though. They have to collect and clean the bottles. Single use plastic get thrown away with the costs being externalised to everybody else.

Possibly . . . it would be interesting to have more data on this. Intuitively it seems like reconditioning a glass bottle would cost not insignificant energy and labor, compared to landfilling it. But I would be happy to know.

That may be true, which is the reason I specifically only addressed the question of safety, and the fact we have extensive experience with it in real life conditions.

The problem is, the population has expanded since then. Every new individual born is a new lawsuit vector. The scale of acceptable risk has been tipped towards higher safety standards, and I don't think we're putting that genie back in the bottle as the population on Earth continues to grow.

I don't think the population argument makes sense. The number of lawsuits a company is exposed to will rise linearly with the number of bottles they sell, whereas their profits rise (due to fixed costs) more than linearly as a function of sales.

I think there's some legitimate concern. Specifically, beer is pressurized, where milk is not. It's an addressable concern (see jagger27's link), but you don't want a bottle exploding on an unwitting customer.

Just make the bottles stronger. I understand there will be some game theoretic problems with that though, which seems to be a big problem right now...

Increasing the wall thickness of a pressure vessel has rapidly diminishing returns (especially in a brittle material like glass), increasing shipping weight for very little benefit. On the other hand, scanning for defects in reprocessing is easily automated with very low marginal costs.

Game theoretic problems? Could you elaborate?

The company who is able to get away with making the cheapest bottles which breaks the most, still benefits from other companies which are contributing to a recycled glass availability pool.

The incentives are such that companies are trying to make the crappiest, least recycled bottle from virgin material, since there is no guarantee they will get a bottle they manufactured, back at the plant.

In Ontario we seem to manage this fairly well.

https://www.thestar.com/life/food_wine/2013/06/28/the_averag...

To answer GP's concern, they're x-rayed in reprocessing, which would detect unsound bottles.

It's too bad glass beer bottles seem to be going out of fashion these days in Ontario. Instead, people seem to be moving to aluminum cans. I miss the old days when you look at the bottom of a beer bottle and see a ring of wear because that glass had been recycled dozens of times (just washed and reused). You can see the ring of wear in this old bottle:

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jqHUfssta_Y/Tbt_aoiPgjI/AAAAAAAAB...

This is still visible on a fair bit of beer - Sleemans sticks out in memory the most as always having wear rings on their clear bottles.

Of course you dont want that... In the US, where they will sue you for looking wrong at people or they will rally up a crowd in protest... In the rest of the world where people are normal that is not a problem. Specially considetong that if the glass is already fragile it will either crack during cleaning or while being transported. If the bottle can handle being clinking on the bands while being filled up, I am sure it can stand being on the fragile hands of some folks

This is not a nice comment and a rather reliable way to either get your comments downvoted, flagged or to get your account banned eventually. There are some guidelines for commenting linked in the footer of the page. For your convenience:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments

Could you specifically call out what is wrong? I fail to see it other than you being offended by the commenter's view

"Be kind. Don't be snarky."

Tough to do since we are all so used to an internet where snark is the most common form of communication. But it's worth trying! I find being less snarky can actually do more than just make your comment "nicer:" it can actually affect your mindset in a way that I think is positive.

> In the US, where they will sue you for looking wrong

This is not true, and is clearly meant as a jab

> In the rest of the world where people are normal

Once again, a jab. Also "snarky" and "sneering", which are both mentioned in the HN commenting guidelines.

If you rewrite the comment in question, removing the first couple of sentences, it is a great comment. The jabs are just unnecessary hyperbole.

> Considering that if the glass is already fragile it will either crack during cleaning or while being transported. If the bottle can handle being clinking on the bands while being filled up, I am sure it can stand being on the fragile hands of some folks

Generalizing to all US americans and implying that they are not 'normal' compared to the rest of the world is certainly not nice, is it? And I say that as someone who isn't even directly addressed by that statement.

And the following is literally the first paragraph on the article:

"Glass can be recycled infinitely without losing any of its properties. Why, then, are most countries — with the exception of those in Europe "

Thanks for serving as the perfect excample to the type of attitude I was referring to

So far I thought you were talking about perceived higher risks because of liability in the US which you thought were unwarranted because a bottle that survives refilling would also survive normal handling by customers (+language that deterred from your point which I critized). Now I don’t know what attitude you are talking about.

A bit of internet collective wisdom borrowed from the highly reputable source of reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/22j0n6/why_do_am...

The attitude I am referring to is that of when people having it too good need to find something to complain about insted of brushing off a generalization (which as most stereotypes is based on factual bases)

Based on the snarky-ness of the article favoring "the greatness" of European nations (compared to the rest of the world), maybe I should have said "not in the US, where 'most' will sue you for looking wrong at them"

As a side not suporting my case, haven't you seen how many post here in HN talk about "patent trolls"; and why all (oh excuse me, most) of those are actually talking about America?

Maybe "slide to unlock" rings a bell?

You dont see those type of things in, lets say, Brazil or Mexico (where I am from) since in case the bottle has an anomaly you go back to the counter and they would just say... "Oh sorry about that, here is a new one", you know... Being civil, instead of keeping it as a "golden ticket" to take it to the court. Why, because people realizes that the coca-cola truck may have it a bump a bit too hard and that just life, we know it and we just go on with it...

In the US, truth is a defense for libel. It would be correct to generalize North Koreans aren't normal due to shared trauma. Living in the US but having traveled overseas, the US seems to have its own traumas.

This isn't a court of law. And legal definitions aren't super relevant in day to day conversation. You could say any country isn't "normal" compared to the rest of the world, and then find some "true" way of defending it. That doesn't make it nice though.

Tone policing is used to reinforce the status quo. It's not nice to talk about the crimes someone is abetting; how many dead in Iraq due to the unnecessary invasion? The 40,000 US citizens who die every year from automobiles? The hundred thousand innocents dead because some people won't wear masks? It's certainly reasonable to suppose people of the unchallenged world superpower 1992-2019 are not normal.

You legitimately just proved my point. As I said, you can say any country is not normal and be correct, because every country is unique.

Just reread my previous comment. Your response makes no sense in relation to it

> In the rest of the world where people are normal that is not a problem.

That seems overly broad. The rest of the world includes some pretty nasty places.

Weight in transportation systems is probably one factor. I'd also observe that more and more mid-range to higher-end beers are shifting to cans. It used to be almost impossible to find canned beer (which we preferred for canoe camping) outside of the mass market BudMillCoors stuff.

The lining material got better. Back in the day, canned beer tastes off. Today, that’s not a factor.

For canoe camping, I go bagged red wine or brandy. Keeps the weight down on the portage.

I don't think this article is based in fact.

Glass cannot be infinitely recycled, as they point out later on, glass containers can be recycled, but not windows. it gets more contaminates in. Also colour glass needs to be treated separately.

They also seem to not understand that melting glass eats a fucktonne of power.

From my reading of this: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/old/5703.pdf Using 100% recycled glass only reduces energy use from 4.3 megawatt hour per ton(for virgin glass) to 3.8mwhr per ton

By far the biggest saving is to reuse the bottles.

unless i've missed something, this article is pure horse shit.

I worked at Pepsi in the 80s when we were still doing glass bottles. There was an entire line of guys that stood there all day and sorted glass bottle by soda. A 24 bottle tray with random bottles was grabbed at the head of the line and as it went down the line you grabbed the bottles for your stack, Pepsi, Mt. Dew, Diet Pepsi, and so on and put them in a 24 bottle tray of just that flavor. Once you had a full pallet of trays you hit a buzzer and fork lift guy would swing by and grab that whole pallet.

This went on all day, every day. If I recall there were 5 or 6 guys on the line plus forklift guy. And life sucked if one guy was sick.

Then, once all the bottles were sorted they were all put on the bottling line and washed, sterilized and refilled with soda.

Plastic did away with a lot of jobs at the bottling plants. Maybe 20 people per plant? Then the lack of a need to wash and refill glass did away with all the "local" plants that were scattered all over the country to just a handful these days.

Not just the melting of the glass, but the collecting of the glass, sorting it, cleaning and crushing also take a lot of energy.

Again, as the world is learning/has learned, recycling is not "free" and is much, much worse than (a) reducing the need in the first place and (b) reusing.

Reduce, reuse, and put in a giant pit so we know where to find it later.

Aluminum is the real winner for recycling. It is far more economic and energy efficient to recycle existing aluminum than it is to make new stuff from ores.

Sand mining is ecologically destructive.

I should clarify that I am not against recycling of glass. I actively do it (but then I live in Europe.

I agree that we are using sand at an unsustainable rate.

However I am disputing the assertion that the USA recycling its glass will make a material impact on climate change, compared to switching to nuclear/solar/other

While this is true, I'm not sure this statement alone is helpful to the discussion. I'm not sure that mining of any material is not ecologically destructive. So we have to compare _how_ destructive different materials are to gather and then probably full chain. Given the glass can be recycled, that's an advantage on full chain. Maybe someone knows more than me (not my field) but I'm willing to bet that glass is better in both amounts when compared to the popular alternative, plastic.

Depends on the kind of sand, that worry is more about sharp sand. I believe ocean sand can be used for glass?

not only that but we're actually running out of the stuff:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is...

I'm surprised to read in these comments that bottle reuse at the commercial scale is quite common in some areas.

Here in NY we recycle glass but it's primarily through single stream recycling or via bottle deposit machines, which I believe both smash the bottles and mix the streams. I presume this is because bins of broken glass are significantly higher bulk density than in-tact bottles.

Seems like this boils down to a logistics and handling problem.

I think we are reaching a point where it makes sense for an "ISO Container" but smaller scale, for ease of automated logistics. Something basically like a milk crate but better for automated stacking, shuttling along conveyers, and un/loading by robots. It would be an interesting way to come full-circle for glass bottle reuse.

Edit: did some digging and I guess Euro boxes are a thing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_container

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systainer

> I'm surprised to read in these comments that bottle reuse at the commercial scale is quite common in some areas.

In euro beer country, bottle deposits are super common even on table beer (your basic lager), there’s automated sorting machines which work on crates (24 bottles, of either 25cl or 33cl) as well as singles and spits out a barcoded ticket you redeem at the till, usually using it to pay for the next crate.

Have some relevant science! - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutectic_system

Similar to this is metallic glass, which has the potential to be injection molded. If we can figure out Fe-based bulk metallic glass then a lot of problems will be solved.

In terms of recyclability, I don't think metallic glass has any advantage over polycrystalline metal.

It's much stronger though.

If the melting point can get low enough then we're in business. Press quenching has been developed pretty well for boron steel and should be adaptable for bulk metallic glass in injection molding machines. This would provide an easy route to high volume production. Surprisingly, eutectic systems are resistant to impurities. Perhaps this is why silicate sand glass became a thing in the first place.

Aluminum has a problem with oxide dross, and tin cans require high temperature for recycling. I don't know if the tin is recovered, but I do know that it isn't very plentiful.

Well if we can’t recycle it does it break down into tiny particles that then become a part of the food chain? If the answer is no then maybe worth a look.

Huh? We use metal for all kinds of containers. Yes, I think it is better to use metal than plastic when possible (and we can recycle it).

Metallic glass and metal are both made from the same atoms.

Right, the line of thinking is there a material that has the advantages of glass (reusable) without the disadvantages(heavy, easy to break, questionable integrity) and without the disadvantages (environmental pollution).

Sounds like aluminum would fill this niche to me, although that’s energy intensive to produce.

Why try to find one material that fits every application?

Steel cans are better for canned goods where the pressure is low and they rely on design more.

Aluminum is usually better for cans of soda under pressure where they're stronger.

Glass is heavy, but strong in certain compression modes. It's nicely recyclable but does use more fuel to transport.

Plastic is lightweight and really I wish we didn't ever start using it except as it is -- a space age high tech super material that deserves better than to be unnecessary packaging.

Paper I'd love to see used as much as possible, but it falls apart when wet.

Cardboard is better when a bit wet, and is cheap and easily reusable.

I don't think we need one answer here, each of these cost different amounts and it depends on the application. What I'd like to see is instead a list of alternatives to every plastic application using metal, glass, paper, whatever it takes.

Can't help but wonder... You're supposed to reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order. Could we standardize a few glass container shapes, and provide easy ways to return them for re-use, rather than spending the energy breaking them down and melting them back into the same shapes again? I would be fine with all my bottled drinks coming in just a few shapes.

I can't tell if this is satire. We used to do exactly this with milk bottles. From [1]:

"In 1975, 94% of milk in the UK was in glass bottles, but as of 2012 this number was down to 4%."

The reality is that plastic is so much cheaper that people balk at the cost of recycling exactly like the price of humanely treated chicken eggs even if they want to do the right thing.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_milk_bottle

Proud to say that my milk is in the 4%. Interesting how sometimes progress is a step in the wrong direction, the milk man even had an electric car way back in the day!

> balk at the cost of recycling exactly like the price of humanely treated chicken eggs even if they want to do the right thing

That is right before they balk at paying the farmer more than 25p a litre to produce the milk they are going to drink.

Over 90% of bottles sold in Norway are returned to be recycled, and most of them probably go through automatic machines in the shops.

Norway and other countries have a deposit system where you pay extra per bottle, and then get the money back when you return them. Places that sell these products are required to accept any bottle that their customers bring them, so most of them want to use these automatic machines to avoid hiring extra staff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI7OldXuq7c

These machines have existed since the 70s, but the modern machines are of course much more intelligent than the early models. They used to accept glass bottles too, but they are not part of this system anymore. (glass is recycled separately)

Tomra is one of the larger manufacturers:

https://www.tomra.com/en/collection/reverse-vending

Does the melting process need to run nonstop? If not, you can use cheap off-peak renewables for it too.

Currently yes. There's a lot of heat capacity to the furnaces so a cold start requires a lot of heat to get to nominal. That's not to say one couldn't be designed in such a way that it can be set to idle without losing too much heat. It's probably much easier to do that if it's electric vs nat gas.

a carbon neutral future will never come as long as wealth inequality exists at the levels they're currently at.

all carbon negative or neutral actions will disproportionally harm the poor and middle class who will use political power in order to prevent said changes.

i'd love to be wrong, but the evidence is there.

reusing glass, though is environmentally friendly, would drastically increase the price of beverages. it's not going to happen at scale.

With all the glass being thrown away for some reason the concrete industry came to my mind. Made me wonder if crushed glass could be used in concrete since glass is essential sand? I know concrete needs a specific type or sand and maybe glass would be a no go for cement but it popped in my mind and has me wondering what we could replace the sand with. Also the main issue I see with glass is it is at least twice as heavy. So the carbon emissions savings would need to offset the transportation emissions.

Another comment mentions this is done in New Zealand. It appears adding glass to concrete increases durability, while adding plastic or rubber decreases durability (sidenote: adding rubber to asphalt increases durability of tarmac/road surfaces, while reducing maintenance costs and road noise).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09500...

http://asphaltmagazine.com/asphalt-rubber-pavement-moves-eas...

Thanks for the links!

As I understand it, the sorting, cleaning and transportation of recycled glass is more costly (i.e. worse for the environment) than using virgin materials.

In New Zealand AFAIK collected glass is crushed and added as sand to concrete (perhaps reducing logistics waste?): https://productspec.co.nz/media/f2ebqrwk/architects-booklet-...

Here in California, the local landfill crushes the mixed-color glass and uses it as a cap on the day's waste to help keep things contained. It's an important function, and (IMO) a good use for the glass. I do believe that the sorted-clear glass is still valuable enough to be diverted back in to new production.

Equating cost with environmental friendliness might not be the best thing to do because this exactly fails in systems where externalities are not priced in yet.

I agree.

But the externalities of sorting/cleaning/transportation would also need to be measured.

The article sort of mentions this, but overall it is a typically unbalanced "recycling is 100% good" and "More countries need to pass laws to reduce waste and eventually stop sending glass to landfill" without the balance of looking at the total waste of recycling versus using virgin material.

Meanwhile, I think money is often a good proxy for environmental damage (especially as an individual), because the safest bet is to assume externalities are similar even for two very different choices.

It's not a huge use, but in the US I believe ground recycled glass is spread over freshly painted road markings while they're wet so it bonds into the top.

AFAIK it’s not recycled, but specifically made tiny glass spheres. Crushed glass doesn’t magically return light back as glass spheres do.

They state in the article if the world 100% stops making new glass we will save 19 lbs of co2 per person from being emitted. 86m tons world wide per year. Stopping a 1/2 beef burger from being made will save 18 lbs of co2 equivalent from being released. So glass is not the place for a big greenhouse gas impact. What sucks is if I don't buy this big burger I will not stop it from being made. I will just make it cheaper for others to eat beef.

It takes a lot of gas to 1. get glass to a recycler and 2. Ship that recycled material to bottlers, stores, etc. It's not really a panacea for that reason.

When I was a child you exchanged the coke bottles at the grocery store. This decreases the footprint of the glass because you were going to the store anyway. If the distributor also transports the empties back on the same vehicle, then the footprint is mostly down to the production side - a bottle of Coke costs what a bottle Coke costs.

A heavy truck uses more gas than a light one. It's never free to move heavy things around, it's just another externality. There's certainly some economy of scale to having the grocery store do the moving instead of individually owned cars doing 'small' (on an industrial scale) runs to depots, but it's really pretty hard to account for.

Still a helluvalot better than just burying that glass in landfills. Requires gas to get it there as well, yaknow.

I can't get the point of the article. I don't think we ever reached a point that we recycled plastic so many times that it started loosing its property. Most of the applications of plastic doesn't even require best grade plastic.

Meanwhile for years people used to say glass last forever and thus instead we should use biodegradable plastic...

What! Where did they say that! I've always been told to recycle glass because it's easy to make new glass from, is this a recent thing?

Sounds like malicious advertising from people making PLA garbage, which I mean literally since "compostable plastic" rarely is without expensive industrial composting equipment (instead it contaminates the compost so you can't use it) and PLA (while theoretically recyclable) is not so in basically any curbside recycling anywhere.

If you collect it special and find a specialty recycler it can be done, but it's hardly going to fall apart sitting in a landfill in an anaerobic (oxygen-free) environment.

My understanding is that recycling glass is energy intensive to the point where it's not economical, leading recycling programs like in our local town to choose to dump the collected glass instead.

The most effective recycling seems to be for aluminum due to high energy cost of converting the ore, and low cost of melting the metal.

For sure aluminum recycling is more cost effective than glass recycling, but I've definitely never in my life heard the suggestion that it's better to literally put glass in landfills instead... that really sounds like the kind of topsy-turvy logic you get out of a company pushing plastic.

Granted this is a biased source, but they claim that "Energy costs drop about 2-3% for every 10% cullet used in the manufacturing process," [1] so it really seems like in principle it should be less expensive to recycle it (by a little bit) and that if it's more costly than making it fresh it's due to logistics rather than any fundamental manufacturing cost.

[1] https://www.gpi.org/glass-recycling-facts

Yeah looks like fully recycled glass at best requires 30% less energy input than virgin glass. And the single-stream logistics are enough to make that uneconomical, unfortunately.

Aluminum recycling energy input is 95% less than smelting - that is a very nice gain, meaning you get 20x the material for the same energy cost vs. 1.42x.

Glass bottles are also 10-20x heavier for capacity than aluminum or plastic bottles, like <60% content fraction vs >95%. Absolute amounts of that recycling energy inputs are apples and oranges, but with as much as 50% mass and 25% volume worth for delivered products having to be recovered in order for glass bottles to be recycled, or even reused, I can't picture microscopic oranges here.

Yes, glass and metal packaging are appropriate in different use cases and glass is much heavier than either plastic or metal. We're not really trying to find the one true packaging material right? Some are better than others depending on the context.

Glass is pretty amazing material but weight is not where it holds an advantage, nor in tensile strength.

Edit: Heck, even steel versus aluminum depends on the situation. Cans of stuff are usually steel still while beverages are almost always aluminum.

People often confuse money cost with environmental cost (at least it makes it easy to know who published the study ahem).

Here in NL the monetary cost for melting glass is about 85% of sourcing new glass. So it's a small win. The envirnmental cost reduction is the raw materials saved.

Beer bottles are almost all reused for a number of times though, greatly improving their environmental impact. Wish they would do the same for wine bottles.

>That really sounds like the kind of topsy-turvy logic you get out of a company pushing plastic

or just the topsy-turvy logic of a system that generally ignores the true cost of landfills. When throwing stuff out costs an amount that rounds to $0, systems will prioritize that.

As I mentioned in another comment, most crushed mixed glass is used as landfill cap between the layers. It's not 'just' being trashed- the cap is an important function in modern waste management.

It might not be quite the same as recycling bottles, but I worked for a cut & tempering shop where we would recycle all of our waste glass. We recycled many tons of waste glass and were paid for it.

I recall people in the UK saying in the 80s we should use plastic bags instead of paper to save the trees. But cordial was still sold in glass bottles with a deposit. The only negative sentiment I recall for glass was a belief that discarded bottles started forest fires and killed animals that crept into them but couldn’t get back out.

When you say people, who are you referring to? I have never heard anyone claim that.

As was posted on HN a few weeks ago this seems to have been part of an advertising / propaganda effort by the plastics companies, alongside the idea of recyclable plastics.

Glass degrades (physically) ultimately to inert pebbles or sand. Not sure who you were hearing this from, if you were, but it was a bogus argument.

I (from the uk) have never heard that personally.

One use for recycled glass is insulation in the form of foam glass. Another win for the environment.

Glass bottles are heavy. QED.

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