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Comment by Mehticulous | Hacker News Reader

Recycling.

That one is a bit complex. Recycling things like paper, metal and glass works very well, in particular if they are sorted at the source. Most plastics can’t be recycled cost effective, which a lot of plastics producers have work very hard to hide.

I've been wanting to post an Ask HN on this: What's to stop us from going back to steel, paper and glass? You know, packaging we can actually recycle.

Convenience

Profits

Last three years I've been in the Netherlands, all pop was glass bottles, similar with most water

close the externality with a carbon tax

Cost differences and price sensitivity.

And more importantly, how much of a tax would it take to make single-use plastic bottles uneconomical? Are we talking 20 cents?

Not very much. I rarely buy beverages in anything else than aluminium, glass or cardboard. For some food stuff, like meat, cheese and some vegetables I think it is hard to get rid of plastics completely, but you can easily reduce the amount by 80%-90%.

Making those things emits a lot more pollution than plastics. And costs a lot more too.

Why do you think so?

Recycling glass is terribly inefficient. It’s so heavy that it requires a ridiculous amount of energy to heat up, and even then needs a very high amount of “fresh” glass to keep it usable.

In addition, transporting glass is inefficient, and it is much more prone to breakages.

The real issue is the fact that every company gets to have their own plastic bottle design, with 3-4 different plastic types that have to be triaged. They typically also want way thicker bottles than required because they feel more premium.

A government that mandates a specific shared plastic bottle designed to be recyclable would be much, much ecologically effective than switching back to glass.

I don’t know if metal cans or tetrapack are better.

>A government that mandates a specific shared plastic bottle designed to be recyclable would be much, much ecologically effective than switching back to glass.

Given the thread we're in that bottle will some type of unimaginable cancer after 30 years and in 2070 people will be talking about how big plastic captured government.

Glass on the other hand is the definition of inert, who cares if it's more expensive if it keeps us alive longer?

The people who live near the glass recycling foundries, and the environmentalists pissed at the footprint of the continual energy requirement to melt it all down and move it around.

Also, it doesn't further enrich/entrench the oil industry to the same degree as most plastics based manufacturing does.

Environmentalists are pissed wind turbines kill birds. We should stop paying attention to people who want us to live in a cave licking moss.

> Environmentalists are pissed wind turbines kill birds.

Those are not environmentalist, but people who are trying to find any excuses to oppose renewable energy. Environmentalists know that wind turbines kill a fraction of the numbers of birds killed by things like house cats or power lines.

Back when beverages came in glass bottles, they would sterilize and refill them rather than recycle them. Much less energy and no fresh glass required.

I've got an old 7up bottle that was about 20 years old when I bought it in a 6-pack.

It requires significantly less energy than producing new glass. The reasons glass isn't recycled more than it is in the US are political and educational. Many European countries recycle 90% of the glass.

It’s complex enough that I don’t think your answer really covers it. For example glass is not very efficient to recycle. It needs to be transported to be used and often the cost of transporting it is not worth it.

Glass bottles are still reused in big parts of the world, and millions of tons of glass is recycled every year. So clearly some people think it is worth it.

Did you read what I said? It is indeed recyclable but it’s quite inefficient unless said glass collection is geographically near glass manufacturing facilities. Cullet is heavy and usually glass plants are built in a geographically advantageous area. For example, while glass is commonly collected in the US as recycling, it is often trashed because cullet is not cost effective to transport.

It definitely is great to be recycled but hauling around cullet in diesel trucks that is further away than your raw materials might not be the best decision.

As far as I heard paper can’t be recycled because the fiber gets shorter every turn. It can be respiralled until it’s worthless pulp.

Eg:

> Fiber cannot, however, be recycled endlessly. It is generally accepted that a fiber can be used five to seven times before it becomes too short (as a result of repulping and other handling) to be useable in new paper products.

- https://archive.epa.gov/wastes/conserve/materials/paper/web/...

I thought the same about glass but that turns out to be genuinely endlessly recyclable. Good to know!

It’s a very big different between “can’t be recycled” and “can’t be recycled endlessly”. If the fibers can be used 5 times, it means that we can reduce the numbers of trees that have to be chopped down by 80%.

Having spent two years working for a paper company, marketing had a lot of work trying to get rid of the public perception that recycled paper is good. It takes a lot more energy to deink and treat recycled paper than manufacturing from fresh fiber.

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