Bottle Recycling - Different Colours...

DanGlee

Hi,

OK, I've been having a debate with somebody at work and I'm not sure what the correct answer is.

Basically I'm saying that even though we have different colour bottle banks (clear, brown, green) that essentially it doesn't matter what colour bottle you puit into the bank as it all ends up getting crushed and ground down to near dust, then super heated to a liquid and made into glass again. Colour doesn't matter.

He however is saying that once you upset the apple cart by putting a green in a brown or brown in a clear banks that all that the glass in that bank is now only good to be ground down on used on the roads.

I think he's wrong?

Does anybody else know what the story is. I've often but brown in clear or whatever if one of them is full...

DG.

probe

In most continental countries where bottles are crushed colour doesn't matter - everything goes into the same container. The only requirement is that they are rinsed out before being recycled - so one doesn't have wasps and other insects waiting to attack recyclers in the Summer!

In Germany, bottles are generally recycled without breaking them. The consumer brings them (eg beer bottles) back to a shop and puts them in a recycling machine which returns the deposit paid on the bottle. The machine stacks them in the returnable plastic containers used to deliver the original product to the shop. That requires a ban on cans of beer, a law mandating deposits to be charged at point of sale and the recycling machine to return the deposit. However it saves the large amount of energy consumed in making a glass bottle, because the bottle is just washed and relabelled. It also implies compliance with standards in the industry in terms of bottle shape and size, and works best where people buy locally produced goods - a very alien concept in unsustainably structured Ireland :-(

sarahirl

actually come to think of it, yeah why is that? have always been told that if you put a brown bottle in with green bottles it'll contaminate the whole lot... have a whole lecture on recycling which includes glass recycling but i can't see any reason mentioned for the segregation - shows how useless college really is :pac:

Judgement Day

In a previous life I was involved in the scrap business and also dabbled with glass recycling as it was, then, worth more per ton than scrap iron but the strict segregation of glass by colour demanded by the end user was too difficult to comply with. So unless things have changed since then I think that the cross contamination at bottle banks may well mean that much of our so called 'recycled' glass ends up in landfills!:(

DanGlee

Also, thinking about it, when you go to bottle banks, there is no major warning about cross contamination, just a couple of bottle banks with different colour labels? If they are that strict about it and recycling then they should put up big signs stating the consequences if the wrong bottles are put into the wrong bins!

Cookie_Monster

The last time i saw a truck emptying the glass banks it lifted the three different colour banks to exactly the same place over the back of it before emptying them so i presume they were all just mixed up anyway...

Del2005

Doesn't a lot of our glass end up as road fill since Ringsend shut down? It could never have been considered green to ship tonnes of sand(glass) out of the the country for recycling. And isn't a lot also used to make insulation, or is that made out of the country also?

I do rememeber many years ago when I was younger that we where taught not to cross contaminate the glass as it was just dumped if you did.