I get doubtful looks from friends when I explain to them that the only waste worth sticking in the recycling bin is aluminum and glass.
These articles that have popped up on this topic are hugely useful to refer people to. I don’t enjoy being right, I just want there to be an open understanding of the lies that have led us to this situation so new solutions can be developed.
It might just be that burying it in the ground for the next few hundred years is the best solution, and through laws attempt to curb the explosive growth of plastic use.
Not even glass, actually. Glass is pretty much just molten sand, and there's scarce value in recycling glass, when you can get fresh and clean sand instead. It makes sense to reuse glass bottles, but recycling glass into new ones is pointless.
The thing many people don't know is that not all sands are equal.
For example desert sand is not usable for cement or other building purpose. We are currently running out of sand usable for it and are scrapping it from the sea ground or islands, both doing MAJOR environmental damage.
For glass the context is a bit different the sand needed for glass production seems to be readily available, at least in the EU (source German Wikipedia article about Quarzsand, no english version).
But producing (bottle) glass from recycling glass needs much less energy then producing it from sand.
Furthermore recycling glass bottles isn't too hard to do, especially if you produce green glass.
In Germany in average 60% of glass used to produce a bottle is recycled, for green bottles its up to 95% for mineral wool it's up to 80%. (German Wikipedia).
(As a side note only bottles go in the glass recycling bin, class from e.g. a broken window does not belong there!)
As someone who can look down from above into the recycling trucks I don't know what to make of the fact that they empty the separate collecting containers for green, brown and white glass into the back of the truck. Without any separation at all. Once I asked a driver why that is, and he answered: "I'm just the driver, no clue." The trucks are just regular "Muldenkipper / Dump Truck" which have a little crane behind the drivers cab, crane hooks into their tops, lifts them up over the back, does something to the top hook, shakes a little, bottom opens up, glass falling down, empty container back to the curb.
The answer I've always heard: because recycling facilities can't trust regular people to sort their trash right (and for good reason), so it gets dumped into one pile on the truck and then resorted properly at the facility.
Regardless whether that's the reason, I think making people sort their trash is dumb anyway, and the more requirements you give (sort into 7 piles, must be clean of grease, etc.) the dumber it gets. The effort discourages a good chunk of the population, while the rest end up wasting so much water inefficiently washing their trash in their sinks.
The main value would be keeping it out of the landfill, in my opinion. At least glass melts back down pretty clean, I just think given how easy it is to use either existing glass or fresh sand interchangeably it's worth a little extra to keep the pre-used glass out of the landfill.
I was working at a Waste Management landfill and noticed it had acres and acres of 10 foot tall mounds of glass. The workers didn't know the plan for it. I suppose eventually it might be valuable to recycle it. But somebody used energy to wash it out, sort it, and transport it. Seems like a marketing green wash.
If it is not economical to recycle, let's admit the facts rather than pretend to make people falsely feel good about saving the planet while actually using even more energy to truck it around.
I think I'll have to just agree to disagree with you on that one, I think that glass will eventually be used even if it's not the right time today. I think it is worth the investment to separate it out since it is comparatively low hanging fruit to get out of our landfills later.
We’re running out of beach and construction sand, which needs to be somewhat coarse to be functional. Desert sand particles are too fine, alkali content is too high, and is generally full of contaminants.
The main sand used for glass is quartz sand. I don't know if desert sand can be used.
Through quartz sand is still widely available.
The reason we recycle glass bottles is that it's much more energy efficient to create new glass from recycled glass and it's not to hard to sort/separate glass so recycling glass makes sense for reasons which are unrelated to how "rare" the resource it's made from is.
Note that this is only true for glass bottles (or similar), things like window glass is made from different sand mixes and should not be placed into the glass recycling bin at all.
I have no idea if you can recycle window glass (as e.g. non window glass) or similar. But it's not part of the glass bottle recycling process and is seen as a form of contamination if placed in to large amounts in the recycling glass. (as far as I remember)
One of the dairies nearby sells their milk in heavy glass bottles. They charge a $2 surcharge that's refundable when you return the bottle, and they reuse all the bottles they get that aren't damaged. I wonder how many cycles they typically get out of a bottle before it's no longer useful.
I'm not sure about those milk bottles, but in Germany the "Mehrwegpfandsystem" typically gets 40 to 50 cycles from a glass bottle and up to 25 cycles out of a PET bottle. Unfortunately, this system has been on the decline in recent years and customers often choose single-use plastic bottles.
Depending on where you return them, the Mehrweg PET ones just get shredded. You can hear that. Sometimes I heard glass getting crushed too, but that was a few years ago. Not recently.
Clear glass bottles are great for reusing though. I know of at least a few local breweries that reuse their clear glass bottles. When you buy the beer you pay a ten cent deposit per bottle which you get back when you return them. It’s a great system!
PET is also useful to put in a recycle bin (or in the PET bin, or bring back to the store, whatever is the correct thing to do where you live), it's highly recyclable. I'm always surprised to see that a lot of places don't seem to care about it and don't have special accommodations.
These articles that have popped up on this topic are hugely useful to refer people to. I don’t enjoy being right, I just want there to be an open understanding of the lies that have led us to this situation so new solutions can be developed.
It might just be that burying it in the ground for the next few hundred years is the best solution, and through laws attempt to curb the explosive growth of plastic use.