Why no 'recycle value' on glass wine bottles?

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Wine drinkers are too pretentious. It would make the bottle look cheaper with a 10C stamp on it.
 
Because the energy to convert the ingredients to glass is the expensive part of the process and it is gone when the bottles are cool. Silica is plentiful and the primary ingredient in glass.

To "recycle" glass means melting it along with many other bottles and whatnot in a huge furnace and adding fluxes and stirring to get a homogeneous product that can then be run through a processing machine to get more bottles or whatever, but it is much easier, for the same energy to use raw materials and be assured of a clean and consistent product. Or the glass can be crushed when cold and used as gravel or aggregate in concrete or pavement.

If glasses of varying coefficient of expansion are combined in the same melt, products may not be homogenized and the glass may actually pull itself apart due to internal mechanical stresses. It is also much harder to get clean, pristine product from recycled glass than from raw glass.

Roadbed aggregate is a great way to recycle glass. Remelting recycled glass is mostly a marketing gimmick and the work is often aesthetically or even structually inferior to the same work produced from batch (raw) glass.

Cheers.

BSD
 
Thanks, didn't know Maine was doing that.
I think recycling has more to do with landfill space than actually remelting and reusing the glass; however, I have no idea what really happens.
Maybe our local landfill sorts through all our waste and pulls out the materials they can salvage when there is a demand for that material and/or space becomes limited.
 
Because the energy to convert the ingredients to glass is the expensive part of the process and it is gone when the bottles are cool. Silica is plentiful and the primary ingredient in glass.

To "recycle" glass means melting it along with many other bottles and whatnot in a huge furnace and adding fluxes and stirring to get a homogeneous product that can then be run through a processing machine to get more bottles or whatever, but it is much easier, for the same energy to use raw materials and be assured of a clean and consistent product. Or the glass can be crushed when cold and used as gravel or aggregate in concrete or pavement.

If glasses of varying coefficient of expansion are combined in the same melt, products may not be homogenized and the glass may actually pull itself apart due to internal mechanical stresses. It is also much harder to get clean, pristine product from recycled glass than from raw glass.

Roadbed aggregate is a great way to recycle glass. Remelting recycled glass is mostly a marketing gimmick and the work is often aesthetically or even structually inferior to the same work produced from batch (raw) glass.

Cheers.

BSD

This is not true--glass has infinite recycling capabilities (any impurities are easily removed) and virtually all glass includes ground recycled glass as one of the ingredients by default.

It also requires half the energy to recycle a pound of glass as it does to create it from raw materials, and while the raw materials are plentiful, open pit mining is devastating to the environment.

http://earth911.com/recycling/glass/

Some states do have redemption values on wine bottles.
 
Some glass is recycled. The end of my basement floor was heaving up so I decided to lift it out and repour. I found some previous owner (it's an OLD house) had used bottles and jars of many various types to fill the concrete. Then he had placed cinder blocks on top and capped it with a thin layer of concrete.

So I am lifting out cinder blocks with concrete stuck to the bottom and broken jars and bottles sticking out of that!
 
I have no idea why... but I'm glad of it. Local bars and restaurants are a great place to score some free wine bottles. :)
 
Part of the problem is the value for glass cullet. I looked into this a while back to see about setting up recycling at a friends bar. The cost to simply transport the glass from the bar to a central collection point was more than the current going rate of glass cullet - after being sorted and cleaned. Part of the problem is that there is simply too much glass available so there is no financial incentive to reuse.

Most glass manufacturers get their cullet from internal production (i.e. even though you use cullet to reduce the cost of making glass, you have enough reject product that it fills a large % (if not all) of your cullet requirement.
 
Recyling told me it has to do with the weight of the bottle........liquor bottles are not recycleable here too. But.if you take them to the recycler.they get money for them..go figure.....so I just toss them in the landfill
 
In Michigan at least, only carbonated beverages have deposits on them. i.e. water bottles and juice bottles do not have deposits. I also believe that the reasoning behind it was to reduce trash, so people cruising down the street don't throw out their empties into our beautiful rivers/lakes/woods, etc. At least that's what I had heard, that it wasn't to be green and recycle, but to keep litter to a minimum. This is also why we have one of the highest deposits for cans/bottles ($.10). I don't know why champagne bottles don't fall into the carbonated beverage category for recycling, but my guess is that they figure people drinking wine/champagne aren't going to be tossing their wine bottles out of their car?
 
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