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Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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