An Alternative Recycling System
Various organisations, like the Council for the Fossilisation of Rural England, think that all glass bottles should have a deposit that is returned, when you take the bottle back.
This is very old thinking as these days we can do much better!
I recycle all my glass and put it in one of those large cylindrical containers in one of the neighbouring villages, as we don’t have one in the village where I live. These are then craned away on to a truck to go to the central recycling centre, The system works well, except when the containers gets filled and the truck doesn’t empty them for a few days. Incidentally, most recycled glass round here ends up being used as road-stone and hardcore. This may seem a waste, but I think it is actually, the most energy efficient way of reusing the glass and it avoids the need for digging hole to extract gravel.
I got to think, that this system could easily be modifed to create an incentive to recycle.
Let’s take glass bottles, although it could easily work with things like newspapers, old clothes and rags, aluminium cans or plastic bottles.
You would create a Recycling Fund, that was either filled up by a levy on all glass bottles sold or directly by central government.
The recycling container would be stamped with an empty weight and every time it was collected, it would be weighed to ascertain how much glass had been recycled. I suspect that the crane on the truck could do this very simply and easily.
Councils would then have a map of which areas recycled the most bottles say, and this would then earn that area an appropriate proportion of the Recycling Fund, which could be spent how the area wanted. Perhaps, they might want a children’s playground to be refurbished, some public toilets re-opened or just some flower baskets.
What has been created is a virtuous circle. The more you recycle, the more you get for local projects. Areas that didn’t recycle wouldn’t get any special projects, but those that did would get a substantial environmental improvement.
I suspect that such a scheme would be affordable and non-bureaucratic to run. It could also be run initially without a bottle charge, so that people saw trhe benefits before they paid.
The Anonymous Widower 
There is a real problem with recycling glass. It requires a lot of energy to move it about and even more to melt it down to make a new bottle. There are other uses such as creating a ground up gravel like material for use in roads, but even this requires a considerable amount of energy. The best thing to do with a used bottle ir to reuse it. It is already a bottle and doesn’t need to be made into another bottle. Standardisation on bottle sizes and styles would allow them to be reused after cleaning in multiple indistries. Cartons come is standard sizes, and so why not bottles. To encourage the use of standard bottles a tax on the bottle cost could be imposed to ensure that the use of non-standard bottles was economically disadvantageous.
Comment by John Wright | September 19, 2010 |
A good proportion of bottles are re-used already; milk and beer in pubs for instance. Also wide glass jars are often reused astorage containers. But a oood proportion are also foreign drink bottles for wine and beer. The best thing to do with these is smash them and use them as hardcore. The Fordham bypass was built on a glass embankment.
The system though would work well with aluminium cans and plastic bottles.
Comment by AnonW | September 19, 2010 |
Surely, wine bottles are a good case for reuse. They are all the same size, made in only a few styles, have only a sticky label to identify the contents, and are used in abundance (at least in our house). I admit that we do have a problem returning them to their country of origin, but if the incentives were there, the wine could be transerred in bulk and bottled in the country of consupmtion. As a student I once worked at the Whitbreads bottling site in Tottenham High Road near White Hart Lane. One of the jobs I did was loading crates of bottles on to the conveyor feeding the bottle washing machine. After wasshing the bottles were replaced in the crates for transfer by conveyor to the bottling lines. The whole bottle cleaning process was automated (in 1965!) and so I am sure we could do even better now.
Comment by John Wright | September 19, 2010 |
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