This is a friendly request for a citation on this point - because the above appears contrary to what is widely and commonly stated about glass recycling - for example, here and here.
There are two different kinds of recycling. There’s reconstitution, where things are melted down and remade again, e.g. glass, which uses a lot of energy, more than it saves.
And there’s re-using, where you take something that is no longer needed and use it for something new, e.g. turn an old CRT TV into an aquarium (to use a lame example) expending minimal additional energy.
I say we should concentrate more than we currently do on re-use than on reconstituting.
Well, OK, but again, this is contrary to the widely-circulated information - in both of the links above, it is stated that recycling glass (by melting it) requires less energy than making it from raw materials.
In the long term, recycling will be worthwhile. As has been stated above, recycling aluminum + copper has always made economic sense. Recycling iron and glass may be a wash economically due to the ease of finding raw materials + weight. Recycling plastic, OTOH is becoming more economically feasable, and I believe it will become highly profitable. By forcing recycling of plastics, you force people to come up with new ways to recycle and new uses for the recycled material. I recall seeing a show on TV that some researcher found a way to mechanically link disimilar plastics.
I’ve been wondering about this. Is there a mechanical reason why the smoke from incineration has to be released into the atmosphere? I would have thought you could rather easily filter all the solid particulates and even most of the gases using power generated by the incineration process itself.
unless you are talking copper, lead aluminum. Glass recycling is senseless, you waste more energy TRANSPORTING scrap glass, that you gain by recycling it.
it reminds me of NJ-the people of morristown were carefully sorting their trash-separating glass, metall, paper,etc. the local (Mafia owned0 trash hauler just dumped it all together! :smack:
finally succumbed and resubscribed so I could respond to this
The problem lies in the life cycle. A lot of plastics, for example, aren’t as useful the second or third time around, and are downcycled into park benches, etc. We need to use materials that can be recycled easily and without loss of quality. See the excellent book, Cradle to Cradle by McDonough and Braungart for more.
I’m a visionary!
Since neither cite offers an explanation for for their claims I can’t argue their points, and in a brief perusal of on-line sites, the general claim seems to be that recycling glass saves energy, but the stated figures vary widely, and seem to be based on “pure” cullet (recovered glass material) that comes from production waste of glass manufacture rather than the impurities (stabilizers, colorants) typically found in finished glass products like bottles and windows. I know from my exposure to plate and cellular glass manufacture that the raw product has to be in granular and relatively homogeneous form, necessitating the laborious sorting and pulverizing of recycled materials into suitable raw stock as opposed to using high quality quartz sand which is readily available and easily sieved. It isn’t clear that the costs in recycling encompass this, or indeed, exactly what they include. I’d swag that the cost of transportation and handling of glass for recycling versus that for natural sand is at best a wash, and more likely favoring the use of virgin material which is readily and cheaply available.
I’m not sure where the claimed energy and pollution savings are coming from; the bulk of the energy for glass manufacture comes from the energy required to heat the raw material up to melting temperature (>1430°C), and for float glass, the molten tin bed. More efficient ways for regenerating and recovering energy in this process have modestly lowered energy requirements glass manufacture, but there is a hard minimum to how much it costs to form a glass product from its constituents. I don’t see where the claimed savings are coming from. Once you’ve factored in the human labor to perform sorting operations, the cost between new manufacture and recycling per ton does not favor recycling.
If the desire is to reduce the energy into and pollutants and waste resulting from glass manufacture, the real solution is to reduce the unnecessary wastage of glass products to begin with. The use of ‘cheap’ soda-lime-silicate glass in the packaging of beverages is a key example of the disposable packaging costing far more to manufacture than the product it contains. Design for reuse, in this case, makes far more sense for the total product cycle; however, bottlers figured out long ago that economically it is much smarter to purchase cheaply made thin wall glass bottles for single use than to manufacture, transport, wash, and reuse thicker wall glass bottles, hence the virtual disappearance of the old 16 oz bottles that use to clutter the redemption corner of every supermarket. Cheaper yet are plastic bottles which are more durable, lighter weight, faster to produce, and readily formed into a multitude of shapes, and unfortunately, persistent in the environment.
With regard to landfill space, even noting the costs above, it is much cheaper than most current recycling costs, and the issue with availability of suitable landfill sites for solid, non-degradable waste is more of a political problem than a technical one. The real problem with glass and especially plastic products isn’t that we don’t have anyplace to stuff them, but that they tend to not be disposed of properly and end up back in the environment. On this issue, the notion of reduce and reuse (or replace with either more reusable or biodegradable alternatives) trumps recycling on any rational basis regardless of cost or availability of landfill space.
Stranger
Are the plastics used to make containers petroleum based?
If so the oil crisis makes me grateful of at least one thing: the rising price of petroleum will torpedo any idea of beating the price of aluminum by switching to plastic.
I’m old enough to remember when most liquids came in glass containers. I don’t know what the environmental implications of glass are versus other materials, but it certainly improves the tactile experience of “a bottle of Coke”.
What I love about the Dope! Any and every kind of expert or specialist you want…
And when it is, then people will pay you to do it. The fact that the only things people will pay you to recycle are aluminum cans indicates that recycling aluminum is a better use of resources than mining it. The fact that it costs more to recycle glass and plastic than it does to make these things new indicates that recycling wastes more resources than it saves. A higher price is an indication of inefficiency. When the resources to make glass and plastic become scarce, the price of making new products from these resources will rise. Eventually the price of recycling them will indicate that it wastes less resouces to recycle. It’s a pretty simple concept that, unfortunately, most don’t seem to grasp. The idea that recylcle=good has been pounded into us for so long that we can’t understand that in many cases recycle=wasteful.
They pay me for glass + plastic bottles too, so I don’t think this is the best gague of what is a better use of resources.
Right, but the cost of recycling plastic is dropping, and people are coming up with ways of using the recycled material. Glass will probably never be worth recycling, because of the weight. I believe plastic recycling will be profitable relatively soon because people are forced to recycle it.
Who does?
If someone other than the government is doing this, then great. That is certainly an indication that recycling is a good use of resources.
And I have no problem with that. I’m not anti-recycling; I’m anti-“recylcing is good no matter how much it costs.”
Any redemption center I’ve ever been to. The same ones that are paying for my aluminum cans. I understand that this is because the goverment passed a law. You can get others to buy your aluminum cans, but you can also get them to buy scrap iron, and as **Stranger on a Train ** noted, iron is pretty much a toss up.
Agreed. I’d love to see us stop recycling glass, as it has no potential to become profitable. I just think waiting until oil prices go through the roof to develop better technology for recycling plastic is wasteful.
I wonder if the price of oil leftovers is going through the roof, though. Remember, this is otherwise useless stuff. Oil is going up because a lot more people are wanting it an using it, that is, there’s a greater supply. That also means that there’s a greater supply of the leftover sludge used to make plastics, but with only a static (or smaller delta) demand. It wouldn’t surprise me for the gross cost of plastic were to go down, although like with everything else that needs to be transported, the net might still go up.
If it’s the case of government either mandating or subsidizing recycling, then that’s a bad thing in my view. The real price of material indicates whether it is more efficient to recycle or not. Inserting government in the process only screws up the signals sent by price.
Why? Prices indicate if it is “wasteful” or not. It’s hard to see how it’s wasteful if the price of recycling is higher than the price of developing plastic from oil. That right there indicates that it’s a more efficient use of resources to keep doing things like we are doing.
Agreed.
It’s wasteful because the problem isn’t that the material is not ecconomically worth recycling with old technology. It’s that without the incentive of having to recycle plastic, the research that develops the technology that makes it profitable will never happen until oil prices go through the roof. Then we have to play catch-up when the alternative is expensive. Meanwhile, we just keep filling up the landfills with potentially useful material.
A few years ago I had to justify why the costs to run a microbiology lab had increased sustantially. I looked over my records from the previous years, and found that the cost of most plastic material had doubled in under 3 years. This was before the recent price increases. I have no idea why the price increased so dramatically.
Why not? You (whom I presume are not an expert in the oil business) think that this type of technology will be useful to develop. Do you really think that, if this is true, you are the only one to think of it? Do you really think that those who make their living in the oil industry aren’t thinking the same thing? And, if they are not, perhaps that is an indication that we aren’t even close to being at a point where this stuff would be valuable.
Of course, there is an industry around recycling plastic. I would find it very surprising if they are not looking for ways to make their industry more efficient.
OK, worst-case scenario: we have a bunch of plastic sitting in landfills. It certainly isn’t breaking down, so it will be there in the future when we need it. All it will take is some folks with backhoes digging it up.