Our local recycler hasn’t taken anything made of glass since I can ever remember. I suppose my main theory is that if they break it can be a dangerous mess for the guy making his rounds to clean up (time consuming too). Other than that I’m stumped.
Your double negative is confusing me.
RRR sorry usually good about that thing, being a teacher and all (admins: pls edit title). Just wondered why some recycling companies don’t take glass 'tis all.
I’m under the impression that glass is one of the least useful materials for recycling. To make glass, you need sand, which is in abundant supply in a very pure form. I understand that glass made from recycled glass is inferior to that made from sand. Glass is also very heavy, so transportation costs are a significant portion of the burden overhead for recycling.
I was in Park City and they were taking donations to ship a bunch of glass to California because the local recyclers would not take it.
I’ve heard that glass can be recycled indefinitely because it does not deteriorate.
Used glass is just a pain. Lots of stuff in slightly different formulations. And not just color, small amounts of additives are used for different purposes. It isn’t really viable to “refine” many types of old glass.
A glass shop near me has a bin for used window glass. But lots of rules. Window glass only. Not a trace of sealant or anything allowed. Etc.
The main ingredients of glass are sand and heat. Reprocessing glass doesn’t really save much on the latter.
So the real goal is to find ways to re-use the glass as a component of something else, e.g., certain types of concrete blocks. Not a lot of companies doing that, so not much demand for used glass.
(But “back in the day” it was different. Went to a 7-Up bottling plant as a kid. Any returned bottle that wasn’t up to spec went into a bin. The plant remade bottles on site. Had a collection of goofy mistakes that came out of the bottle maker. But then they knew that any green bottle that said “7-Up” on the side was made of the right materials.)
I asked my Environmental Regulations professor about that last semester; I had noticed the same thing at my local recycling facility. Apparently, it isn’t energy efficient to recycle glass, which isn’t to say it isn’t still good for the environment, but you have to figure out where you want your negative output to be. Do you want to recycle and waste energy (ie, most likely waste nonrenewable resources to do the recycling), or do you want to not recycle and dump glass bottles in the landfill? It seemed to be one of those rather depressing lose-lose situations that we’ve gotten ourselves into. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cite beyond my class notes. We didn’t even use a book for that course. I’m sure that someone will be along shortly to say what I just said, but better.
And also use gobs of energy to make more glass.
The environmental saying is “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” In that priority order! Reusing is better than recycling, and reducing is even better than that.
Glass bottles are better being reused (washed & refilled) than recycled.
Except that it apparently takes significantly less energy to make new glass than it does to recycle old glass. With recycling, cleaning and sorting is a bitch.
According to this site:
[quote]
Glass
[ul][li]Recycled glass saves 50% energy vs. virgin glass (Center for Ecological Technology); recycling of one glass container saves enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for 4 hours (EPA)[/li][li]Recycled glass generates 20% less air pollution and 50% less water pollution (NASA)[/li][li]1 ton of glass made from 50% recycled materials saves 250 lbs. of mining waste (EPA)[/li][li]Glass can be reused an infinite number of times; over 41 billion glass containers are made each year (EPA)[/ul][/li][/quote]
But the glass, which is heavy, has to be transported right? So does the sand needed for making new glass. From Tufts University:
That last talks about greenhouse gas emissions rather than the the cost of transportation, but I need more coffee this morning and haven’t looked that hard for transportation costs. But it seems to me that whether you’re moving glass or sand you’re still incurring costs.
I work with recycling programs all over my state, and there are many reasons why glass isn’t being collected in many of them. Here are a few:
- Less and less food and beverage packaging is made of glass, which is the main market for glass collected through municipal recycling programs. So, there aren’t as many markets for glass as there used to be. *
- Glass breaks easily, and if it is collected as part of a single-stream recycling program (everything together in one bin, which seems to be the way many progams are going) the broken glass is a significant contaminant (especially for newsprint) in other, more profitable commodities.
- Related to the first reason, glass containers are heavy and cost a lot to transport. If you have a glass processor/packaging producer close by, you are probably in good shape. If not, your recycling program has to choose between spending lots of money to get the glass to a buyer or not collecting glass anymore. Most recycling proprams run on a shoestring budget, so that choice may be a “life or death” choice for the program.
*On the flip side of this, plastic markets are going great guns right now. Plastic recyclers in the US can’t get enough recovered plastic to satisfy demand.
I can’t find a cite for this, but I remember our local recycling program was adamant about making sure that there were no ceramics in the glass. This includes the ceramic cap on Grolsch beer bottles. They said that a tiny amount of ceramic material would ruin a glass kiln, forcing the replacement of the kiln liner. It’s probably impossible to guarantee the purity of the recycled bottle supply.
So, I still suspect that it’s more difficult to make glass (especially perfect glass) from recycled glass bottles. Personally, I’d tolerate funkier glass if it was made from recycled bottles if it was significantly environmentally advantageous, but I suspect your average consumer would find it icky. Probably a good way to get rid of glass, although not politically popular, would to just crush it up and then dump it in the ocean at some spot where it will replenish beach sand. I’m not advocating it as you’d have to do some pretty controversial environmental impact reports.
On the other hand, 1700 tons of DDT was dumped off the Palos Verdes peninsula in Southern California in the 1950’s through the 1970’s, and glass is considerably more inert and environmentally friendly.
A recent issue of *The Economist * had a great feature on the economics of various recycling efforts. They noted that in the UK there was little demand for recycling of glass, since the main source was wine imported in green bottles, and since the wine was imported (not bottled in the UK), there was little demand for the recycled green glass. There is apparently some plan to import the wine in huge megacontainers and bottle it with the recycled glass once it reaches the UK. This was presumably more cost-effective than exporting the recycled/recyclable glass to France.
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