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FYI, it takes old glass to make new glass. It's been many years since I had the materials classes, but at that time about 30% of the "batch" was cullet, or old glass that was being melted down.
Depended on the glass maker and the equipment. Where I worked the number for cullet was 15%, old furnace and a company that kept postponing re-builds. We could only handle flint glass (clear).
Another advantage to using cullet in the batch instead of 100% virgin is that the melting point lowers so you can cut the furnace temps by 10% or so, which is a lot in 2000 degree temps and gas usage.
Depended on the glass maker and the equipment. Where I worked the number for cullet was 15%, old furnace and a company that kept postponing re-builds. We could only handle flint glass (clear).
Another advantage to using cullet in the batch instead of 100% virgin is that the melting point lowers so you can cut the furnace temps by 10% or so, which is a lot in 2000 degree temps and gas usage.
I'm sure the proportions are determined by the final usage. The instructor I had used to be an engineer for Ball Corp., the canning jar people.
When I was a kid I drank Pepsi (with REAL sugar back then) in glass bottles, and I STILL miss it immensely. I despise cans, have never gotten used to them. Thank God that beer still comes in glass bottles!
Glass isn't recyclable in your area? It's curbside pickup where I live. We have to separate the clear from the colored glass. It's an easily-recyclable material.
Here in the Portland-Metro area is an increasing hate-affair with plastic bottles. Bottled water is now is a "bad thing" because it's plastic. Well, for carrying around it is still the better option, I think ~ lighter and unbreakable. But a lot of people here have been switching over to those aluminum bottles. It keeps the water cool but it still heavier to carry around.
I can't imagine 2-liter bottles of drinks in anything but plastic, but I'd sure love to enjoy my soft-drinks again in glass ones.
coke from mexico is usually available at Costco, and it's made with sugar cane instead of HFCS, and it comes in glass bottles. I've seen Pepsi that way also, but I forget where. Trader Joe's sell soda made with real sugar cane in glass bottles also.
as for plastic vs glass, i'm not sure if the OP is just too young to have seen the transition. I'm 29, and i remember when i was much younger there still being places that sold soda in bottles and took the deposit. you brought the bottles back, and got the deposit back. but this was extremely rare. plastic was fully taking over by then.
the beer-snob industry is migrating a bit towards aluminum cans, because it stores the beer better. a few of the crap beer companies sell plastic bottles. but largely, the industry is glass or kegs. beer deteriorates quickly in plastic bottles, so it's usually only going to places that consume it quickly (stadiums, large bars, etc).
Several factors are behind the shift from glass to plastic bottles and jars. Most of them are financial. The lower market costs of plastic. The transportation costs of heavier glass. The operational costs to collect, reuse and recycle. The reduced profit lost to product damaged in transit since plastic is less breakable than glass.
Absolutely none of those reasons has anything to do with improving or maintaining product quality or takes consumer preference into account. Well, perhaps not having to return your glass bottles and just being able to throw away a plastic bottle may be a consumer plus if they're lazy. The only positive to plastic bottles that I can see is that they are harder to break... so they are good alternatives when you're traveling/camping, if you have small children, or if you're near a recreational area where it's normal to be barefooted (like the beach). Although the last one goes back to lazy people not using proper waste receptacles... you wouldn't have to worry about cutting yourself on broken glass and discarded pop tops and bottle caps if everyone made the effort to dispose of them properly.
I think the main cost of recycling is the collection and transportation (and in some cases the sorting out of undesirable contamination). The actual conversion from used to new by melting or such is a minor part of the economics.
For example, I saw a TV show (Modern Marvels, I think), that said that the cost of collecting aluminum cans and transporting them to the aluminum smelters costs SIX time the cost of mining the ore. But making aluminum from ore requires VAST amounts of electricity, way less than that required to melt cans already made from refined metal.
I think the same equation doesn't work for glass or plastic. The transport costs are still high, but the difference is much less between the cost to reconfigure glass or plastic, vs make it new.
aluminum is actually one of the examples of a very useful recycling material. not sure if modern marvels would have covered that....
The problem of using old glass bottles over and over is that a particular bottle would have to be sorted out and sent to the original producer. You couldn't put a soft drink in a mayonaise jar, or ketchup in a milk bottle.
You are talking about a lot of money to hire people to sort and transport glass.
switzerland has this down to a science. the bins are set up so that each bottle/glass type goes into specific bins. it's really not that difficult, we're just too lazy in america.
You didn't have a minimum wage of over seven bucks an hour in those days either. I hate to think what a bottle of Coke would cost now if everyone that handled it was paid the mimimum.
ummm, that's called inflation. you do understand that minimum wage decades ago was actually more valuable than minimum wage today, right? people didn't get paid anywhere near what people get paid today....minimum wage or not.
switzerland has this down to a science. the bins are set up so that each bottle/glass type goes into specific bins. it's really not that difficult, we're just too lazy in america.
It's not about being lazy. It's about economics. There are limited resources to go around, (tax revenues can also be considered a resource).
Recycling will always be based on economics. I know of very few people who would vote to pay more taxes to cover the costs of recycling, (instead of - say more/better schools, more police/fire, etc). I would be 'nice' to be able to recycle everything, but that would utilize resources that we have decided should be spent elsewhere.
I know Europe does way more recycling, and energy conservation in general. That's not so much because they are 'better' or 'greener', but again just simple economics. Most folks in North America don't realize that they pay MUCH less for electricity than in Europe. Therefore recycling and other things (like energy conservation measures), where the cost of energy is very significant, will have different answers than in the US and Canada. See:
Electricity prices around the globe | Leonardo ENERGY (http://www.leonardo-energy.org/electricity-prices-around-globe - broken link)
So the energy saved by recycling aluminum and glass, has a much larger payback in Europe.
It's not about being lazy. It's about economics. There are limited resources to go around, (tax revenues can also be considered a resource).
Recycling will always be based on economics. I know of very few people who would vote to pay more taxes to cover the costs of recycling, (instead of - say more/better schools, more police/fire, etc). I would be 'nice' to be able to recycle everything, but that would utilize resources that we have decided should be spent elsewhere.
I know Europe does way more recycling, and energy conservation in general. That's not so much because they are 'better' or 'greener', but again just simple economics. Most folks in North America don't realize that they pay MUCH less for electricity than in Europe. Therefore recycling and other things (like energy conservation measures), where the cost of energy is very significant, will have different answers than in the US and Canada. See:
Electricity prices around the globe | Leonardo ENERGY (http://www.leonardo-energy.org/electricity-prices-around-globe - broken link)
So the energy saved by recycling aluminum and glass, has a much larger payback in Europe.
it may have larger payback in Europe, but that doesn't mean it's not worth doing here. americans want whatever is most convenient, and we often ignore indirect costs because we don't always associate them with the use of something. so sorry, but i do think it has a lot to do with our laziness.
Usually glass bottles define the manufacturer of the drink by sight. You don't have to see a label to know that a glass Coke bottle is Coke. Once you've seen it once, you know its shape for life. But you need specific manufacturers to create the glass bottles. But with plastic the shape of the bottle has become generic so its more economic for one manufacturer to blow mold thousands of them for competing companies thus lowering the cost of manufacturing it. Thus increasing the profit of the company. But has anyone started to notice that 2 liter bottles are disappearing and being replaced by 1.5 liter, yet the external size of the bottle is the same and the retail price has gone up?
As to plastic bottle recycling: No food/drink container contains post-consumer waste even though the bottle has a recycled sign on the bottle. They are getting credit for recycling the shavings left over from seperating the blow molds during the manufacturing process and nowhere else. But they can only do this up to 10% of the actual bottle.
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