Glass bottle reuse
Hi all,
another post has made me think of this. When I was young, I travelled extensively and in Eastern and Southern Europe and Asia it was common for soft drinks bottles to have been obviously reused many times. Scuff marks would be on the outside and it was rare to get a bottle that was completely new.
I get the challenge, reused bottles must eventually break. Washing them free of whatever the consumer has left inside must be a challenge. Transporting them must be a cost and environmental issue.
BUT if we're to move away from plastic. Is this something we should be thinking about again?
Thoughts? Anyone doing this yet? Or is it just too problematic?
Large scale - it may be difficult. I've seen this done on the small/local scale with glass milk containers. It was an incentive program. You brought the empty bottle to the grocery store and you were given so much money for doing so.
I would never do it: even if you use pressure water to wash them (or whatever now is used) you could never be sure the smallest glass pieces are completely removed from the inside. They might be stuck/glued by sticky drink remnants due to being old or so, glass is transparent and hard to be noticed, etc., etc. Being environment friendly is not always safe in terms of public health.
Large scale - it may be difficult. I've seen this done on the small/local scale with glass milk containers. It was an incentive program. You brought the empty bottle to the grocery store and you were given so much money for doing so.
It's funny you should say that, nearly all milk in the UK until the 1980s was sold in reused glass milk bottles delivered on an electric milk truck. Bonkers how ahead of its time it was environmentally, especially now we all buy 4 pint bottles in the supermarket instead, in plastic bottles and almost always end up with some going down the sink.
My point was it can work, it did work and these are some of the questions we are going to have to get our heads around if we're going to reach net zero...
I would never do it: even if you use pressure water to wash them (or whatever now is used) you could never be sure the smallest glass pieces are completely removed from the inside. They might be stuck/glued by sticky drink remnants due to being old or so, glass is transparent and hard to be noticed, etc., etc. Being environment friendly is not always safe in terms of public health.
This is so interesting...
My job is now both about food safety and sustainability and it's forcing me to think about things differently. When you see the targets and the timelines we have to achieve them, it starts to get bloody real!
I'm not saying this is the answer per se, but what I am thinking is that we are going to have to meet our colleagues part way on some things. What I'm finding is if we exclude all the options which are hard but not impossible, we won't get there. Watch this space is my advice!
Man, imho, if they're washed and sanitized well, why not.......
Glass bottles have been successfully washed and reused for decades without issue
Glass does not absorb anything, and can be sterilized easily
Thinking of my childhood and pop shoppe pop--------those bottles always went back to be reused
The risk of glass fragments would be the same if the containers were brand new----if your process isn't good at removing damaged units now, that will not improve reusing containers
You're biggest hurdle here, will be logistics---products get shipped further than ever, which means getting them back is probably more $$ and LESS sustainable than buying new
Some history from the 1980's
I started my beverage career in a regional brewery back in the 1980's. Our brewery predominately used recycled glass. We had contracts with various brokers that recycled glass and they shipped the glass to us. We also had a line of 12 oz returnable and 16 oz returnable bottles.
We would wash the bottles in a machine called a soaker. It had rinse water pockets and hot caustic solution pockets plus several rinse water pockets and a rinse water jet. The bottles were pushed into carrier pockets. Each carrier has 20 plus pockets and the bottles carriers would go up and down through the various pockets. After washing, the bottles were conveyed to the filler. Prior to filling, we had an empty bottle inspector camera system set up which would take a photo of inside the bottle as well and the finish on the bottle and reject any bottle that had foreign matter and/or glass fragments plus any bottle that had a broken finish. It was calibrated daily and challenged daily.
Then the bottle companies started embossing bottles with the brand name and that put an end to using the recycled bottles. From what I can remember, the returnable bottles ended in 2009 for our place.
I feel the bottle embossing would prevent most places from using recycled glass unless their volume was enormous and had a good logistics system.