I imagine all plastics will be out of the question. I’m wondering about what ways food packaging might become regulated to upcycling in the domestic or even commercial space. Assuming energy remains a $ scarce $ commodity I don’t imagine recycling glass will be super practical as a replacement. Do we move to more unpackaged goods and bring our own containers to fill at markets? Do we start running two way logistics chains where a more durable glass container is bought and returned to market? How do we achieve a lower energy state of normal in packaging goods?
Glass recycling works but its far more energy intensive. The saying was Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and it was in that order for a reason.
Does this account for the energy used in transporting the used bottles to the collection/sorting facility > washing facility > bottling facility?
Personally I’m more in favor of aluminum containers. Aluminum is lighter than glass, less prone to breakage during delivery or recollection, cheaper to recycle than it is to mine & refine, and has a lot more potential uses post-recyling than glass.
The washing and bottling facilities are usually the same place. Dirty bottles go in one side, get cleaned and refilled, and then come out the other side.
The way this used to work is that the user returned the glass bottles they bought when they went to the store to get more of the product. 6 pack of beer? When you returned to buy another 6 pack you’d drop off your empties and the local brewer would pick up the empties as they delivered full ones. Same thing with soda bottles and milk bottles.
The reason we quit doing it is because the bottlers got centralized and moved hundreds, or even thousands, of miles away from the consumer and shipping glass containers with their relatively high weight was too expensive. If we returned to local bottling plants we could also easily return to glass packaging for liquids.
Aluminum sucks for a lot of things, particularly anything acidic. You can work around that by lining the container, usually with plastic but then you’re almost back where you started.
Ideally we wouldn’t be recycling much glass, we’d be reusing it but even for aluminum containers its still less energy intensive to reuse them, by sanitizing, than it is to recycle them.
I can’t be arsed to do the math right now but trust me, it takes a lot less energy to heat a small quantity of water to boiling and hold it there for 10 minutes than it does to melt an aluminum or glass container.