My bottle return story

I think it's two fold:

1. Glass that gets broken in mixed recycling trucks becomes nearly impossible to sort, after mixing with other recycling materials.

2. Pre-crushed glass means sensors cannot easily identify and sort green vs. brown. vs. clear, etc. and different chemical compositions like car glass vs. bottle glass vs. baking tray glass vs. window pane, etc.

I'm not a glass expert, but those are my initial thoughts. I would think it would be important to keep colors and like chemical compositions together for consistent manufacturing in the future.

 

I'm all for cans as they tend to have lower oxygen levels than bottles.

 

I don't know much about glass recycling, I only know that a lot of glass that is "recycled" ends up not being used again. The same is not true about aluminum and steel cans, which are easy to separate and nearly always get re-used.

Also, a short PSA: If you don't recycle anything else, please at least recycle aluminum cans. Making new aluminum is terrible for the environment. It uses astronomical amounts of energy (the most popular method basically involves melting solid rock and then electrocuting the **** out of it, not to mention the energy costs of getting the rocks to the plant) and also produces highly toxic caustic sludges that are difficult to dispose of.

 

I'll add to what you said. I worked a summer job for a glass container company years ago. Some used glass from recycling was piled up outdoors and predicted by color and it was occasionally used in making new containers, but rarely. Old glass is not very reusable for some reason but I never found out why.

To add to that, my city recycling allows glass containers into the recycle bin, but I cannot put broken glasses, ceramic mugs, broken window glass in the bin. So it appears that glass is not very recycleable.

To add to the original OP question, not all beers are a available in cans, so if I want a certain beer, I'll buy it in bottles, if given a choice.

 

I just pictured my empty bottle going into a smelter and popping out as a brand new glass bottle. But just a few seconds of thought and I realized that just isn’t so. Like they are busted to shit as they are dumped into recycling truck.
Money from the recycled products help to offset the cost of the recycling program. So obviously the City is providing tips to make it as profitable as possible.
There will always be beer unavailable in cans. That’s a given. I’ve been a bottle guy without much thought, not counting an occasional pool party where cans were the obvious choice.
But if it’s a toss up, I’m going to take the cans. At least give it a try.

 

If recycled glass is to be reused for products it must be sorted by clear, brown, green, blue, etc. Sorting is harder (i.e. costs more) when the glass is broken into small pieces. Recycled glass material also has to compete cost-wise with new glass raw material, which is basically just clean sand (quartz), very abundant, and cheap. The margins for glass raw material are razor thin and often recyclers can't compete.

The real trick for recycled glass would be to find another beneficial use for it that doesn't compete directly with new glass raw materials. I think I've read that unsorted glass can be ground into sand sized particles and used as fill for construction projects, but that's still a very low-value market.

Market rates for recycled cardboard, aluminum, and some plastic types are much better.

 

I have a client who makes various products out of glass bottles - primarily sand blasting media but other products as well so there is a small market for the stuff. Mining aluminum puts a heavy thumb on the scale when evaluating the environmental merits of glass vs aluminum containers. When a broad view is taken, reusable bottles are most environmentally benign, then cans and then one way bottles. . I first looked at these in a college class in 1972 and even when considering the impact of driving the empty bottles from the retailer back to the bottler, cleaning the bottles and then refilling them, returnable bottles had less environmental impact than throw aways or cans. I haven't seen much in the last 47 years to change that opinion.

 

Remind me why we're not using refillable bottles like we did back in the olden days. These seemed to work just fine.

Edit: Just saw @pat61's post.

 

You might be interested in knowing that refillable beer bottles are making a 'comeback' in Oregon:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesal...rst-statewide-refillable-bottle-system-in-u-s

Whether other states will follow suit?

Cheers!

 

As has been discussed by others the fact of the matter is the glass we place in our recycling bins is often not recycled. Below are some snippets from the below linked article:

“In turn, many waste-sorting facilities dealing with single-stream systems have begun to turn away glass containers while continuing to accept aluminum cans, newspaper and what have you. While there is special machinery that can help MRFs pluck out broken glass from the stream, it can be prohibitively expensive. And so, with nowhere else to go, perfectly good glass is being landfilled by the truckload across the nation.”

And:

“There’s another emerging issue with glass being redirected away from sorting facilities and dumped into landfills: Oblivious to the fact that their recyclables are, in fact, not being recycled, many residents are continuing to dutifully add glass containers and jars to single-stream recycling programs.

While cities such as Baton Rouge, Boise and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, have either suspended or never even offered glass recycling, other cities such as Denver, Chattanooga and Atlanta continue to collect glass for recycling … and then dump it in landfills.

In the Atlanta metro area, where single-stream recycling dominates, some residents are riled up over this rather hush-hush practice.

“The county should have let people know that they really don’t need to be doing any of this. They didn’t need to be saving the glass at all,” Dekalb County resident Carol Lambert tells the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I think a lot of people have come around to doing some sort of recycling, but I don’t like the deception.”

https://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/recycling/blogs/pain-glass-problem-single-stream-recycling

FWIW I still add glass to my recycling bin with the hope that maybe some of it (e.g., 10%?) makes it to a glass recycling facility?

The ‘good news’ is that there is a healthy/robust market for aluminum cans so I am very confident that the aluminum cans are getting recycled into new aluminum.

Cheers!

 

Not sure how you can make that claim. That's going to depend on equipment and process, so oxygen levels at packaging will vary from brewery to brewery... and line to line. If you are more concerned with oxygen ingress over time, that will vary due to equipment and process as well... and the age of the beer you drink.

 

Brewers have also looked at it during that period and, since their decision is based not just on being "green" but primarily on not being in the "red" economically, the returnable/refillable bottle is all but dead* in the US, as these combined charts from the USBA/Beer Institute illustrate:


* Except for the "growler" - which, typically, the customer, not the brewer, owns and is also responsible for cleaning.
And this small experiment in Oregon.

Lots of extra costs (granted, not related to being ecological) involved in the refillables, particularly labor at each level of distribution, and energy costs (transportation and cleaning) as well as water/waste water usage.

You've left out the middle tier in that scenario - the cases of empties first are picked up by the distributors, sorted again, and then to the brewery, which, as time went on and the large regional and national brewers gained more market share, often meant a greater distance away.

That also resulted in the brewers having to buy more and more bottles to make up for the slow returns - so they often owned 3 - 5 times more refillable bottles (which were more expensive thanT/A's) as the "float inventory" than they needed for the beer sales, but they were still in the system - many never to be returned.

EDIT - Oh, yeah - the above are some of the reasons why they died in the US, it is not my personal opinion of them - most of beer came in them 40 years ago or so.

In addition, many customers also didn't like them - they'll drink from a reusable glass and eat off of reusable plates using reusable flatware, but were "grossed out" by drinking beer from a reused bottle? Go figure.

 

you are absolutely right - I was looking at the environmental impacts and not the economic impacts.

 

Chris, I am uncertain what you are getting at here. Once a beer is packaged (put in the can or bottle) the can will experience zero air (oxygen) ingress over time.In contrast the bottle has the issue that air (oxygen) will ingress over time through the cap liner.

Cheers!

 

JK, one more example of returnable beer bottles is that Straub brought them back last year (2018):




https://www.post-gazette.com/life/d...ewing-Owens-Illinois-O-I/stories/201805070132

Cheers!

@dcotom

 

The better questions is why aren't more people boycotting breweries that use cans wrapped with plastic? Bottle or can debate I get, but how dumb do they have to be to add something that doesn't get recycled to the mix.....

 

A couple of points- Last time I looked cans are made from only 30% recycled aluminum. Haven't kept up with things since retirement from the recycling business, could be that figure has gone up. Bottom line is that every can is made of at least 50% new aluminum that needs to be mined as bauxite, converted to aluminum oxide, then to aluminum. It is an energy hog both in process and transportation, and a poisonous process that pollutes. No matter how careful you are to recycle your cans, the next can you buy means more bauxite needs to be mined, more pollution needs to be produced and sent into the environment.

The reason glass isn't recycled into new glass more is multi-fold, but the main reason is the raw material is so available and so inexpensive that only certain kinds of glass can be profitable to sell for recycling into new glass. Cheaper to buy new raw material. OTOH glass is clean fill and can be used as clean fill in construction projects. I realize much of the country is in the stone age when it comes to their policies for recyclables and disposables, but around here "recycled" glass is put into clean fill and doesn't travel very far to do it. Hopefully that is true for all of us soon.

As mentioned above re-using glass containers is best, such as growlers, or refillable deposit bottles

 

I worked for Coke in the mid 80’s and I can remember the outrage of plastic 2 liter bottles replacing the glass 32 oz bottles.
After all the glass had disappeared from the shelves the outrage seemed to subside. Seems production costs will determine the package not environmental causes unless dictated by law.
In the future, will it come down to limited or specialty beers available in glass due to production costs?
Good chance.
Edit: I would give returnables a try with the right brands. I used to love shorties!

 

Yeah, as I understand it, Straub never really stopped - it's just that their returns got so low that they had to start limiting them to a smaller distro region. (Hey, they were still using 1/8 bbl. (3.875 gallons) "eightel" kegs up until a few years ago, too, as I recall it).

Typo there - left out "MY" beer. There's a Straub shell on the bottom of the pile in that image of some of my old cases - most of which I couldn't return 'cause the breweries closed and/or the retailers refused 'em! I had an argument once with a PA distributor who swore they never even CARRIED Straub - "Yes, you did. They used to be shelved right there, sometimes they were Steinies, other times longnecks. And the T/A greenies were there. With a couple of cases in the cooler!"
"Oh, musta been before I worked here...").

 

When those heavy-plastic PAKTECH things got popular I swear I remember a brewery saying they'd pay a nickel for them, used. Last I saw, they only offered to "recycle them" for you (no refund). And now I've got about 3 cases full of them in the cellar and my town doesn't take that type of plastic as recycling!

Pretty sure I read where some brewer (Edit - CARLSBURG) is experiment with gluing the cans together to make a sixpack, and ABInBev is trying compostable ones for Corona (so, won't be used in the US by Constellation).