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Comment by VBprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...

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.

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