Interesting my municipality recycles glass, but like, why? Silica is the most common mineral in the crust, easily accessible almost everywhere, and recycling it takes as much energy if not more than just making new. It's not like aluminum or steel where there are significant energy savings to recycling vs mining and refining.
It's just melted, mixed and reused, AFAIK. We're recycling glass since forever (maybe mid 90s), and the recycling bins were put out by our national glassware company.
They even have a special line built with these, recycled glasses, which I don't remember the name. They also have a "upcycle" line where they repurpose their fine but not perfect items to other things. Both are excellent lines and are not more expensive than their usual wares.
Far, far earlier than the '90s. Glass has been regularly recycled from the early days of glassmaking itself. It's crushed up into "cullet" and mixed back in.
Glass is great for this because it doesn't degrade from being remelted and reformed, and using cullet reduces the cost of energy and new raw materials when making new glass.
You’re absolutely right. I meant recycling as ordinary citizens in my country with that date.
It saves 30% of the energy inputs to reuse slightly contaminated glass, especially when done locally.
That's ignoring the energy inputs of mining and delivering the silica.
https://learn.sustainability-directory.com/learn/what-are-th...
?? Isn't this one of the most recyclable materials there is? Even aluminum cans come with contaminants that can't be removed by the consumer.
Regardless, at least you can easily reuse glass jars for home use. I find they make excellent drinking glasses and the reusable lid is a nice perk.
Recycled aluminum is much less energy intensive than new aluminum even with contaminants.
But transport and sorting (glass is hard and sharp) eat into that margin, so presort
I know that in some places they standardize the glass beer bottles to one or two types and strongly encourage people to bring the bottles back to the same location that they get beer from.
This results in a circular supply chain that sees bottles sterilized and reused many times. The number I heard was an average of 8 uses on average before a bottle gets a chip in it that renders it unsuitable for reuse, and then it is recycled.
It seems to me that this tight distribution loop is a key part of successful reuse and recycling endeavours.
In the US we throw everything into a truck and we expect recyclers to sort and re-melt a bunch of broken shards of assorted glass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation
In the NL, such 'reverse vending machines' are in every supermarket. They take PET soda bottles, soda cans (since 2023, €0.15 deposit per can), and a few (standardized) types of glass beer bottles.
The latter are often bought in crates, which (with empty bottles in them), are taken by the machine as a whole. On average, these beer bottles do ~20 roundtrips between supermarket & brewer. It simply goes in reverse direction along the same logistics chain supplying those supermarkets.
Non-deposit glass is collected in containers, seperate by color (clear/brown/green). Those have been around since early '80s or so. These days there's also containers for paper/cardboard, textiles, or even used frying oil/fat. Most supermarkets have smaller bins for batteries & small electronics.
Germany even has multi-use PET bottles.
From (extensive!) personal experience, these deposit schemes take a HUGE chunk out of beer/soda cans & bottles littered on roadsides, parks etc (some 75% reduction or so).
But it is cultural thing too. Most people in European countries care for their environment, energy use etc. Most US people, no so much. Other countries: it varies.
But the push for single-stream recycling has led many well intentioned people to believe that solution is good enough.
It is! ... if it's unbroken, sorted by type, and in a place where there's demand for it.
Unfortunately, those advantages are often compromised by the recycling pipeline itself. Bottles of different types are thrown into trucks, and become unsafe shards of glass that are unsafe to handle and difficult to sort by type. It quickly becomes more trouble than it is worth given that the alternative is sand.
Also, some of pizzas I get have a separate circle piece they sit on and the box doesn't get any grease on it.
Some accounts I've seen emphasized the "don't check it, don't think about it, don't look bad, don't feel bad" performative and self-delusion aspects.
I partly blame an old Discovery Channel episode I watched as a teenager (probably Dirty Jobs?), which highlighted a line of men standing in front of a conveyer belt at some kind of recycling or garbage plant, manually sorting things out of the waste by hand before the bulk of it got dumped into a huge vat of treatment water. The impression it left on me was that there's always a bunch of dudes at the conveyer belt who were going to check and make sure nothing unrecyclable went into the recycling process.