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Comment by jagger27 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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

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.

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

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...

"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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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