Do we need to rethink our reliance on plastic?

Because the UK imports a lot of products in glass bottles we actually end up with much more glass waste than can be economically recycled. Even shipping it back in empty containers to the countries of origin is grossly uneconomical so we have created a glass mountain. Some is reused in industrial processes, and some is reused in the construction industry, but melting and purifying glass to produce a useful raw material is extremely expensive. A lot of glass waste is also specially treated or laminated to give it additional properties and is not easily converted back to ordinary glass.

JW thanks for the info but do you have the source? I note the rider “economically recycled” but could be marginally too expensive to over the top expensive. Finding new uses or making plastic bottles more expensive may solve the problem .

Here is a view on the market:
recyclenow.com/recycling-knowledge/how-is-it-recycled/glass
and a new use
sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170419112444.htm
in low cost batteries.

The previous link was a bit finnicky but here is a technical article on using the glass for batteries. Very encouraging.
eetindia.co.in/news/article/waste-glass-holds-key-to-more-efficient-batteries

and I know some of you will be interested in what ee think are the best Kickstarter offers back in February!!
eetindia.co.in/news-gallery/25-most-promising-tech-ideas-on-kickstarter
and probably best spoken of in the Lobby.

Patrick – I missed your previous post asking about my comments on glass waste. I don’t have a specific source for what I wrote, it was just the distillation of various things I have read.

Recycling of glass waste is a big industry that has been going for many years and so it is a partial success story but it does not deal with all available waste and is struggling to find new end-uses. A lot of post-consumer waste glass is still going to landfill or incineration.

Waste glass can be reformed into new glass but it is difficult to keep the cost below that of processing virgin materials, especially for the purer grades. It is a heavy material to transport and if it has to be collected from a large number of different sites there are economic and environmental drawbacks. Waste glass also has to screened to remove non-conforming material. Some new goods can be made entirely from waste glass if colour, transparency and freedom from impurities are not critical factors. The use for battery cells shown in the link you posted seems like a good one and there must be many other applications where, if we can tolerate some inconsistency in the finished product, glass would make a good substitute for metal, or plastic even. Uses where a smooth and impermeable surface are the chief requirements would be best.

Glass fibre production [glass-reinforced plastic – GRP] is probably a substantial user of waste glass where the fibres of glass are a reinforcing material for the polymer and the resulting light-weight material lends itself to pressing and moulding.

I read some time ago that waste glass was being partially reprocessed – basically just crushed, combined with other waste like fly-ash, and heated to give it some plasticity and composition – to make a hardcore base layer for roads, runways, foundations, and other such purposes, but ideas on what else to do with it soon run out, especially since other low-cost materials [like crushed concrete] are readily available in ever increasing quantities. I have wondered whether glass roof tiles would be worth experimenting with – not for their translucency although that could be a sub-benefit – but for their impermeability, resistance to moss and lichen accretion, and appearance in preference to concrete tiles. Glass or part-glass building blocks might be another possibility. These kinds of uses would substitute for extractive activity and cement production to obtain the basic raw material, however so long as concrete can be produced cheaply either in prefabricated or site-made form glass will find it hard to compete unless aesthetic qualities are important.

It is the weight and reprocessing cost of glass that has driven the use of plastic. Reuse of glass consumer waste was once a significant and cost-cutting activity. Jam jars and beer bottles were largely uniform in standardised contents volumes across all food and drink manufacturers and could be returned to any factory or brewery for reuse. When most beer was sold through pubs and off-licences run by the breweries this was cheap, quick and easy. Now there is a multiplicity of shapes and sizes unique to individual contents and probably very little reuse as they are sold through supermarkets and, at best, the empty bottles go in the recycling bin.

I was interested to see on the BBC News website this morning an item about a Scottish company that is recycling plastic waste into road surfacing material. The plastic is turned into tiny pellets which are combined with asphalt and bitumen to produce a smoother, stronger and longer-lasting road-making material; it significantly reduces the amount of asphalt and bitumen [oil-derived material] needed for the road surface. It made the important point, though, that we should not keep increasing the use of plastics now that we have a good method for using the waste! It would be interesting to test whether a road made with a sub-stratum of waste glass mix and a top coating of plastic-infused asphalt would be a less environmentally-damaging structure with comparable or superior performance characteristics while at the same time economically neutral at worst.

We recently bought some rustic-looking drinks tumblers made from recycled glass and thought we were helping the UK to reduce its glass mountain, but when we took off the labels on the bottoms of the glasses we noticed they had been made in Spain. Typical!

Thanks for the long and thoughtful post. I did see about the Scottish road surface and one might consider in all of these things the possibilities of giving the alternative ideas a leg-up until they can reach critical mass where they can compete. Or it may be that socially we need to use the alternatives despite them costing more.

Glass tiles is an interesting one as it does seem to provide plenty of new options. I am rather partial to glass as a material because of its essential durability and lack of exotic additives. Though we do have art glass which does have such stuff.

I feel I should mention again the Spacia glass which gives near triple glazing performance with two thin sheets of glass. Invented in Australia, made in Japan , sold in the UK.

In the not too distant future there will be an awful lot of replacement double-glazing to be considered.

While checking out home batteries, I came across solar roof tiles which Tesla are launching later this year, and which I have long thought all new build homes should come with as standard.

They are made of glass and although I could find no mention of using recycled glass, perhaps they will be in the future..

http://uk.businessinsider.com/tesla-solar-roof-solar-city-features-2017-2/#tesla-will-offer-four-types-ofshingles-to-match-different-housing-aesthetics-in-an-effort-to-get-homeowners-to-ditch-clunky-solar-panel-add-ons-in-favor-of-a-beautiful-roof-1

Patrick – Thanks for your response.

From what I see around this area there already is a lot of double-glazing waste, both glass and UPVc frames, as people fit more aesthetically pleasing windows and upgrade their first-generation conservatories. I notice that most skip companies claim to reuse or recycle a high proportion of the contents nowadays; this is probably due to the Landfill Tax. I don’t know anything about the reprocessing of the UPVc frames; I cannot believe it is a low-energy and harmless activity except under strictly-controlled conditions.

I had not realised that glass roof tiles were already a practical proposition, Alfa, so thanks for that link. As you say it would be better if they could be made from recycled material. I think the aesthetics of our roofscapes are particularly important and a more harmonious treatment would be most welcome. We have grown to live with satellite dishes everywhere, just as we did with ugly TV aerials, and over the years they became less obtrusive as the technology improved. I am hoping this will happen with solar panels; some installations look appalling with no thought given to appearance as the scheme is driven by optimising the solar gain and the crude economics of uniform panel sizes. I hope I am not prejudiced but I feel that the older generation are most prone to this tendency, especially those living in bungalows.

It’s interesting – and perhaps a clue to the economics – that in the Tesla demonstration examples the glass tiles were attached to high-status real estate. It certainly looked attractive, however, and would enable the solar gain to be achieved, virtually invisibly, across a very high percentage of the south-facing roof area rather than in the concentrated surface-mounted rectangles that we see today.

It is time that housing developers here gave more consideration to the orientation of their dwellings so that they predominantly have south-facing roofs to one aspect or the other.

Duncan says that, in the USA, householders are barred from installing renewable energy generation due to pressure from the power companies, and yet Tesla is offering this system that will be fully independent and owned by the property owner. Luckily we have Ofgem and the Competition & Markets Authority to ensure that such restrictive practices as exist in the USA cannot be pursued in the UK. I cannot see the concept of “The Englishman’s home is his castle” being compromised in the Brexit Britain we have today; indeed the sentiment might actually be reinforced as time goes by.

This comment was removed at the request of the user

They never seemed to catch on though, Duncan, presumably because slate and then concrete tiles were cheaper to produce. They seemed to be reserved for small out-buildings like wash-houses and privies where there was not enough wall space to install windows. Perhaps their time has now come with the inclusion of a PV cell in the tile.

One factor that will affect the cost of a glass PV roof tile installation will be the ease with which each individual cell can be linked electrically behind the tile to all the others to feed back to the intake system. Perhaps a mass-produced grid or net of connexions, or a special form of sarking, is laid across the roof before the tiles are fixed in place, or, alternatively, perhaps each tile has male and female connectors that will interlock across the roof. Tesla are a being bit coy on the practicalities and the design features.

Given that we all now use supermarkets and all expect high standards of food safety, we all probably need our food to come safely and securely packaged.

But we can still then apply the 4 R’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Recover

Reduce: Hardy any-one in the UK needs bottled water – tap water, filtered if need be, is safe to drink. It follows that bottled water is a needless luxury and could be taxed as such.

Reuse: Direct re-use of drinks bottles is possible (we did it a lot in the 1960s), but might require re-structuring of our food and drink industries.

Recycle: Where bottles and such like are needed, care should be taken to ensure that the materials used for their construction can be recycled, in so far as is reasonably practicable.

Recover: If all else fails, plastic bottles can be used as a source of fuel. As noted above by Duncan Lucas, you cannot just burn any old plastic anyway you like – or you risk producing unacceptable levels of toxin partial combustion products. So this option needs careful controls on bottle composition and expensive specialised incinerators.

We have already had recycled plastic bottles on the market – including milk in recycled plastic bottles. The colour of the green lids was amusingly made lighter because the small amount that got into the body of the bottle turned that a pale green shade which didn’t look so inviting. Until more recently we had our milk delivered in glass bottles twice weekly. This is much better as glass bottles can be REUSED up to about 20 times. Only when our routines made it too difficult to manage this did we start buying it when we needed it from the supermarket and keeping a spare plastic bottle in the freezer. We also have UHT milk in tetrapaks for emergency and making sauces, hot chocolate and custard because nobody can tell. Tetrapaks can be recycled in our kerbside collection. Where our parents live we collect them in a box , flatten them and take turns to take them to a recycling bank managed by the carton manufacturers.

One of the problems that I remember was the residue of the plasticised silver foil top which is underneath the coloured plastic top. These don’t always come off cleanly from the bottle. Seeing the process led me to always be more careful so that my contribution to the recycling process didn’t have this problem. However I have noticed more recently a different version of this top – one with a sort of wing in the middle to pull. It has to be strong enough to stay on yet easy enough to take off cleanly. I don’t find this type particularly easy either but am pleased to see that there is change and innovation happening. This is what needs to continue.

I love the way that the film lid on a punnet of blueberries now pulls off cleanly. OK so it won’t be recycled but the punnet can be.

It depends on whether you want your magazine to be read or not IMO. Too much stuff comes in on email and even when quite ruthless in culling the unwanted the inbox keeps on filling up. I’ve commented before that the info regarding recycling the plastic bag is very small. I’ve also commented before that the recycling bins for carrier bags and film inside the larger supermarkets have never ever actually said that this film can be included. It feels as if the supermarkets are not participating fully and why does the WRAP/Recycle Now logo not include this?

Good points.

Which?, as I say perpetually, should be a reliable resource for matters consumer – a consumer wiki – CAwiki.

To keep up-to date an article with relevant [and safe] links to relevant sites and provide an overview is part of my dream of what Which? should be. A low-cost to run but very attractive benefit for members. And funnily enough one were the mass-brainpower of the 670,000 subscribers could be used to assist the paid staff.

Seems to me that over the last thirty years I have never seen a request/survey of what Which? should be. In fact in the last decade only in the last decade would/should it been necessary as a road to commercialistion has been embarked on without any discussion.

Hemp plastic – live and learn!!
hempwaterbottles.tripod.com/what-is-hemp-plastic.html

The economics are not explored but still interesting.

Re: returning bottles to (product) manufacturer, to get deposit back.
I seem to recall a lecture which pointed out that a (cider) company had very serious accounting problems because they could not prophesy how much money they had to set aside to pay bottle-returners… so perhaps disallowing was stable-door closing?

Good idea, Jacquie. The supermarkets could dispense the milk from tanks refilled from a tanker lorry. Savings all round.

I have noticed in places where there is still a milk round with doorstep deliveries that returnable glass bottles are still used. Milk rounds declined in the face of severe competition from convenience stores and supermarkets for which the use of returnable glass bottles was impractical [because casual shoppers would not return them]. Cheaper and lighter plastic containers were seen as the answer and they saved a lot in transport costs and energy [an environmental advantage set against the disadvantage of the use of plastic]. It was naively thought that all plastic packaging would be recycled, and although a lot of it can be it is not as economical and environmentally satisfactory as re-use [even after very high-temperature washing] so we have ended up with cheap milk in a useless plastic container that cannot be safely re-used so is either expensively reprocessed or dumped.

I stopped getting bottles of milk from the milkman when it started to ‘go off’ rapidly. Obviously there was a problem with the bottle cleaning equipment. Soon after, the milkman stopped delivering in our area.

It’s often assumed that plastics can be recycled to produce more plastic, but recycled plastic is inferior. For example, plastic milk bottles made from recycled plastic would not be as strong and there is the danger that the milk could be contaminated by chemicals in the feedstock.

I think going back to the use of urns would have some significant cost and health and safety issues.

Supermarkets would need to either pay staff to handle the urns and dispense milk from them, or invest in some kind of vending machinery.

Churns of similar size to those used traditionally could now probably only be used after the provision of appropriate handling aids.

Supermarkets would need to keep their dispensing equipment scrupulously clean and prevent cross contamination from any customer supplied urns.

Customers can already buy milk in 4 & 6 pint sized bottles when they need to get a lot at once. But, I suspect, many customers who don’t use milk rapidly still prefer to buy individual sealed pints, to get a longer fridge life.

Filtered milk has a storage life of several weeks when unopened because the bacteria that cause souring have been removed. UHT milk is sterilised and can be stored at room temperature prior to opening, but it’s an acquired taste that I don’t think I will acquire. Both filtered milk and UHT milk become contaminated with bacteria once the bottle or carton is opened. With care, it should be possible to carry out an ‘aseptic transfer’ of part of the contents of a bottle of milk to another container without introducing contamination. As a retired microbiologist I will give this a go. Now where did I put my bunsen burner?

Under your stool, so be careful.

Supermarkets use milk as a loss leader to attract customers in who then because of marketing strategy have to walk right across the store past all sorts of nice smelling and deliberately placed and attractively packaged goods. To make a cup of tea you may well have to go in several completely different directions and so pass by an awful lot of other potential purchases!

However on a snowy and icy morning it is just wonderful to open the door to find that the milkman has been and delivered your milk right to your very own doorstep by electric float AND taken away the empties. As a service it is brilliant – and the milkman is/was a very useful community asset. He knew when there was a problem when the milk had not been taken in. Also a very useful service now as other food items can be delivered with the milk – and not in such large quantities as those from the supermarket.

I prefer milk from glass bottles and I think milk tastes much better as a drink from a glass bottle than a plastic one.

However milk in the plastic containers with a handle is easier and lighter to hold, and the big plastic containers fit into the fridge better taking up less room. So this may suit families better.

There is a problem with milk being poured down the drain – and I do wonder how much is actually being thrown away.

It was bad enough when someone didn’t put the one pint bottle of milk back in the fridge!

Sour milk used to be used in cooking. Now there are dire date warnings on plastic containers. With the glass bottles you knew that you had to taste the milk to check that it hadn’t gone sour. Sniffing the bottle meant that the only milk you smelt was the residue around the top of the bottle and that might be on the turn when the rest was fine.