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In article ,
writes:
I continue to ask as my local council has a problem disposing of
coloured glass, it going to landfill. There is a market for clear
glass but even this does not cover collection costs if my local
authority is correct.
Glass really wasn't worth recycling at all until the landfill
tax came in. If you have to start your car engine in order to
participate in glass recycling, then it's almost certainly still
not worth it. "Driving to the bottle bank" is an expression which
is sometimes used to refer to pointless recycling. People are
looking around for uses for coloured glass, and new road surfaces
is something they are being used on, but I think that's still
experimental. Manufacturing and using less coloured glass in the
first place is probably a better bet, but people seem to like
trying to solve problems at the wrong end of the supply chain.
Paper is another questionable one. The cost (in particular the
energy use) of processing recycled paper often exceededs the
cost of creating new paper. It has always seemed to me that
paper should be buried in landfill as this is exactly the reverse
process of burning fossil fuels, i.e. it's taking CO2 out of the
atmosphere and burying it back underground. Actually, planting
fast growing plants, harvesting them, and burying them down old
coal mines could be quite a good thing to do from this perspective.
--
Andrew Gabriel
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