Went to the local tip today, to chuck all the wine/beer bottles in the recycling bins. One large steel container with holes in side marked 'clear glass only', another with 'green glass only' on one side and 'brown glass only' on the other side.
Difficult enough to decide if a bottle is greeny brown or browny green.
Peeped into one of the holes to find no dividing wall inside the container!
A large mess of mixed bottles!
Why do we bother.............
In which case, they're all "brown". ;-)
Brown = any Green = green + clear Clear = clear only
Blue = very expensive.
And to bring it back on topic, where can I get one of those sonic crushers used by Dick Strawbridge to grind glass?
I wouldn't mind having a go at using some in a cement mix.
It's called marketing. They have learned how from the National Lottery.
I read there's no market for green glass in this country anyway as "we don't make/ use green bottles" normally. I know I've bought plenty but perhaps these are imported? The article also mentioned that there is a 250,000 stockpile of green glass in UK that no-one needs, and that lots of our religiously collected and sorted reject glassware ends up in landfill in any case as there is no market for it. Perhaps the psychology is the same as when the steel railings were removed countrywide in WW2, mostly never used to make guns and tanks, just sitting in rusting piles - they were just removed to give the general populace a visual reminder that a shower of skunk crap really was coming in their direction and that they really did need to do something about it! i.e. supposedly running out of holes in the ground in the near future.
On Sun, 22 Jul 2007 17:01:51 +0100 someone who may be "Sidney" wrote this:-
I read many things, but that doesn't mean they are true.
A few months ago I was at a meeting with the manager of a glass recycling plant. He said that much glass is now going into building roads, putting the price up for his operation. As case of unintended consequences.
He also said that there is something of a glass mountain in SE England. However, the costs of transporting this to Scotland are too high for them to make much use of it.
My glass ends up here
Adam
LOL! I was going to ask if he believed everything he read :-)
I wonder what that says about SE England ...
Mary
Interesting, thanks.
Mary
>
does not address the problem that the real loss is in the energy taken to melt and make the bottle and not any salvation by the reclaiming of the glass. The old deposit system for bottles worked very well and saved the large amounts of energy for at least some of the bottles. Do you recall the campaign of years ago by Greenpeace/ Friends of the Earth (or similar organisation) when Schweppes first started major use of non-returnable bottles, "Don't let them Sch.....................on Britain". Amazingly enough most distributors of bottled products do so now with impunity.
The transport costs are,of course, very relevant and must be a prime reason for all the religiously harvested bottles still ending up in landfill, since their scrap value is less than the transport costs of moving them to where they are needed.
As regards the previous correspondents jaundiced view of the written word, he may care to reflect that virtually all knowledge of complex subjects is transmitted and absorbed in this way and virtually none via the "monkey see, monkey do" technique which he seems to prefer.
How does it compare to the energy needed to transport it back to a point it can be reused, and to heat the water needed to wash it and sterilise it to the point it can be used safely again?
But in those days just about every town had it's own local pop factory. You bought your bottle of lemonade from the local shop who got their deliveries direct from the factory, returning the empties on the delivery lorry was no problem for them.
Nowadays we have economy of scale and the local supermarket stocks lots of different brands of fizzy drinks from a variety of distant sources delivered by less direct means. Sorting and transporting the empties to the right part of the country isn't economical.
I gather that it's called progress.
On Sun, 22 Jul 2007 21:40:09 +0100 someone who may be Mike Clarke wrote this:-
In Germany beer is sold in one bottle. Empties just have to be taken back to the nearest brewery, washed, filled and have a new label put on.
I have watched the lorry that empties the clear, green and brown glass containers one by one. The contents all go into the back of the lorry so that the different colours are mixed up. Therefore separating the colours is pointless. The colours aren't separated for door-step collections anyway.
On Sun, 22 Jul 2007 20:34:12 +0100 someone who may be "Sidney" wrote this:-
It seems to be more an example of official stupidity. There is much to be said for recycling some materials into road surfaces, the problem is that they didn't exclude glass from this. As a result those that re-use glass for bottles are having difficulty getting glass to use.
Friends of the Earth's first big UK action. It was beaten by big business who said it was nearly impossible to, despite the same companies doing exactly the same thing in other parts of Europe. However, the idea that we are right and everyone else is wrong has only a limited appeal and the campaign is included in other waste initiatives FoE does.
That depends on the circumstances, which is why I mentioned the SE England problem.
I entirely agree. However, that doesn't mean that everything which is written down is correct and should be blindly accepted.
On Sun, 22 Jul 2007 19:07:22 GMT someone who may be "ARWadsworth" wrote this:-
Just about everywhere else in Europe you would pop the bottles back to the shop, but apparently what works elsewhere will not work here.
Including (and perhaps especially) FoE propaganda....
On 23 Jul 2007 07:47:49 GMT someone who may be "Bob Eager" wrote this:-
As you should be able to work out from my posting, I don't blindly accept anything. That includes FoE "propaganda".
Trouble is we have far too many different styles of bottles here, sorting hem all out and distributing to the right places would be much too expensive.
Same with jam jars. When I were a lad there were only 2 sorts of jam jar,
1lb and 2lb. They were all the same shape and various organisations like the Scouts used to collect empties and get money by sending them back to the jam factories. Now they're all sorts of shapes and nobody wants them back.
Quite.
They would ,however, make, when crushed and mixed with a little sand and cement, excellent flood barriers ;-)
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