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Comment by dmoy | Hacker News Reader

Or aluminum recycling, crazy efficient compared to making new aluminum.

Or glass, or paper, and almost all types of metal.

Also toner cartridges and pretty much anything else where "recycling" means putting back in the hands of the people who built it in the first place.

Unfortunately glass isn’t recycled here. I’ve been trying to figure out why.

Probably more common in places that have glass production.

From what I understand they want a mix of recycled and virgin glass to maximize the characteristics of the glass.

Once upon a time they used to reuse coke and beer bottles, not just recycle them.

I've heard (but am not sure) that the (energy) cost of transporting the empties + washing/sanitizing them may be more than making new ones. At least the dollar cost is higher, or they'd still do it (some local milk farms wash and reuse their jugs, so at some low level it's still efficient).

I wonder if that was true when Coke had licensees in every town handling the bottling?

I don’t think people appreciate what a franchising operation Coke is. Because they don’t have names.

The shorter the distances the easier to break even, which could probably be done with a bit of effort.

I wonder if the loss of glass had more to do with plastic ease of use (no bottle openers) than directly cost.

Heavy packaging definitely loses as miles travelled increases.

Years ago Method defended using thin walled, but non recyclable plastics for their products based on a bunch of factors, including miles traveled, product to packaging ratios, and the recovery percentage of plastic containers. Unlike aluminum and glass, only a fraction of the feedstock comes out of the process.

So if you have an HDPE recycling process that’s 25% effective, you could keep an equal amount of material out of the landfill by making a product with 3/4 the material of HDPE. Which they did (and more) with blister packs.

They list them as recyclable now, but <gestures at the thread> and I think they did the right thing at the time regardless.

Same here. I've heard a litany of excuses, but the most common one bubbled up into a documentary (?) I saw a few years ago on YT claiming that it's more cost effective to manufacture new glass than to recycle old glass. Which just seems insane to me but is probably true (colored/dyed glass mixed in with clear? I don't know).

Our landfill had a recycling center for glass for a number of years, but it was essentially just one guy who was a landscaper/glass blower (or some such). He'd come about once a month to pick through what he wanted and the rest would get tossed. I guess he retired or moved, because they don't do that anymore...

Glass recycling is very efficient, but manufacturing new glass is just cheaper. So without a government subsidy, it's usually not worth it for the recycling plant.

I don't see the efficiency claim if we're talking about glass that's used just once

that why the comment was about "Glass recycling"

Glass is sand. Even for all the separating and such, most of it is "recycled" by using it for fill, because sand is plentiful.

The best thing for glass is reuse.

You would think sand is plentiful, but eg https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is....

I have been wondering about this in context of glass... With concrete and such applications you cannot have too smoot sand, but is it same for glass? As you are going to melt it anyway, it shouldn't matter if it is not usable in concrete...

I mean from like an energy perspective.

Glass and paper are not significantly more efficient to recycle than to manufacturer new stuff. Paper is like 2x more efficient to recycle. Glass is... somewhere around there I forget. In both cases you can recycle all of the stuff, but it costs comparable-ish energy. For paper it's sometimes a clear win because trees.

Aluminum is like 20x more efficient for energy use.

Recycling glass is ~30% more energy efficient than creating new glass https://www.palpa.fi/juomapakkausten-kierratys/eri-juomapakk...

I have no idea about glass industry economics, but 30% energy savings would seem significant for any industry.

Ok yea that makes sense. I had a vague memory it was less efficient than paper but still net better energy.

Still almost everything pales in comparison to 2000% on aluminum

glass recycling is way more inefficient than you think, granted, you don't need the sand to melt but you still need the same energy, so, if the glass bottles are used just once you gain nothing, ecologically

Paper is not efficient to recycle as far as I know. I guess if you have a pure source of quality paper then sure but from what I gather it’s mostly trash. Was that not the big issue a few years ago in the Bay Area? China stopped accepting it.

Paper recycling was worth it when it was mostly newsprint. Now it's mostly packaging so is too contaminated.

I am not so sure about this. Do you have any sources? I think I read that it's difficult due to the abundance of very different aluminium alloys.

I don’t know where you read that.

To quote wikipedia:

> Recycling scrap aluminium requires only 5% of the energy used to make new aluminium from the raw ore

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling

Which cites this article from The Economist: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2007/06/07/the-price-of-vi...

Ok, one example (granted it's a bit niche):

"Since the demand for recycled aluminum continues to increase, the discarded aircraft provide a large source of valuable metal. However cost-effective recycling of aircraft alloys is complex because aircraft alloys are: (a) typically relatively high in alloying elements and (b) contain very low levels of impurities to optimize toughness and other performance characteristics."

https://www.totalmateria.com/page.aspx?ID=CheckArticle&site=...

Also

"The separation of scrap into specific aluminum alloy groups can be checked by Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) or color sorting, but economic and technological challenges limit the use of these processes (Capuzzi and Timelli 2018; Gaustad et al., 2012). All sorting methods offer less than 100 % efficiency. This leads to significant contamination of the aluminum, in particular with iron and copper"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092134492...

Fascinating, thanks.

I can maybe shed some light, however I’m not 100% positive. And you very well might know all this:

My read here is that “aircraft grade” alloys, probably like 2000 and 7000 series, are relatively harder to recycle. They are less used and more expensive, I cba to look up stats on raw production estimates, if they exist publicly.

This is separate from recycled Aluminum being treated as a separate product(green aluminum), with effort made to bring it to parity with traditional Aluminum.[1]

Again I don’t know for sure, but I suspect a lot of it comes down to Aluminum cans being the highest single use of Aluminum globally and being efficient to recycle and make with recycled aluminum.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S007964252...

You can get paid for scrap of various kinds, and by the amount they're willing to pay, you can roughly see how much it is "worth it".

Ignoring gold, platinum, and silver, copper comes in quite high, followed by aluminum and then at the bottom is steel and iron.

Most places will pay you over the CRV for aluminum cans, and they will usually also pay for bulk aluminum, more than they'd pay for steel or cast iron.

"Recycling aluminium consumes only 5% of the energy required for primary aluminium production, resulting in a 95% reduction in carbon emissions."

https://international-aluminium.org/new-iai-study-reveals-en...

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