Should I put dirty glass in the recycle bin?
It will pass through the process. Glass is collected and run through a bunch of processes that remove labels, extra plastic and residue. The glass is broken up and then heated to 2700 degrees and mixed with new glass or glass material to make new glass that is X% post-consumer content. I have read recycling literature that suggests that the main reason you clean out containers is to keep the smell down and the animals away, not because it’s necessary to the recycling process. My sister is one of those people who will stack up jars and cans waiting to be rinsed out before she’ll put them in the recycling, so I looked this up at one point trying to make an argument to get her to clean up her kitchen.
Well I know that recycled paper is of lower quality because the fibers are much shorter, and since wood is renewable resource and paper biodegradable, it wouldn’t seem to be ideal for recycling. Some plastics can be recycled only at a high cost in energy, some can only be ‘downcycled’ – turned into inferior plastics, and some can’t be recycled at all. Glass can be infinitely recycled and doesn’t go down in quality, but nobody cares. The process of melting recycled glass for re-use is near identical to making it in the first place, and the raw materials are hardly rare. This probably is a waste of energy if you look at energy involved in collecting and washing the glass. Just about any metal is worth recycling, because the original extraction process is energy intensive, none more so than aluminium which has to be extracted by electrolysis(1). On a larger scale, old ships and such are regularly sold for their scrap steel, so it’s economically viable at least on a larger scale. (1) In fa
The correct ordering of waste reduciton is: (1) reduce (2) reuse (3) recycle. Whether recycling is actually viable depends a great deal on the transformation required to turn a used object into raw materials from which new objects can be fabricated. Metals are often relatively easy because you simply need to heat bulk metal to turn it into a useful industrial source material. Carbon-based products (plastics) are more complicated because heat tends to break down the long carbon chains, resulting in a different material that was originally put into the recycling system. A decade ago (maybe still, I haven’t been back since), you couldn’t buy a soft drink in a new bottle in Egypt. Any coke you bought came in a worn and chipped bottle that had very clearly been reused MANY times. It would be cool if there was a set of generic glass jars and bottles that could be reused in a similar way for other common food items. You would save significant energy by simply cleaning and irradiating a bottle
