Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by agurk 681 days ago
> Normal glasses are recyclable

Is this the case in reality? Everywhere I've lived drinking glasses were not accepted as part of domestic glass recycling due to their composition [0]

Perhaps there is a commercial recycling route for pubs though? A quick google didn't turn anything up.

[0] https://www.friendsofglass.com/ecology/what-glass-can-you-re...

4 comments

I assumed my city wouldn't accept drinking glasses due to safety issues. The assumption being that the most likely case someone would recycle a drinking glass is after breaking it and they don't want their workers getting cut. Turns out it isn't really compatible with recycling beer and wine bottles.
> The assumption being that the most likely case someone would recycle a drinking glass is after breaking it and they don't want their workers getting cut.

All the places I know (Denmark/Germany) the glass you want to recycles is getting dumped in containers where it breaks most of the time when you toss it in.

Interesting!

The recycling containers here have separate containers for clear glass and coloured glass and I've always thought glass is glass.

Now I checked in detail what is accepted, and sure enough, drinking glasses and mirrors are specifically disallowed.

AFAIK (but may be massively wrong) is that most clear glasses have many composition types and don't mix well and the industrial brown/green is all the same.
I take that back then. Would these hardened glasses be recyclable though?
"Yes"

From a glass making point of view you don't want them messing with expansion coefficients and bulk properties so they're off the table there - it's a waste of energy to reheat them up to ~ 1,000 C.

But you do end up with large volumes of glass .. a relatively consistant material, you might want to crush and tumble that (to take the sharp edges away) and use that sized grit | frit as driveway material, as additive to concrete where structurally sound, as fish tank "sand", etc.

IIRC concrete aggregate should be jagged so that it interlocks with itself. You actually can't just use any old sand, you need sharp sand, which is an increasingly scarce resource.
My bad .. mentally insert more commas and juggle the clauses :-)

The tumbling was only meant to be applied to application requiring rounded grit, you're correct that concrete and other uses might prefer jagged.

"you need sharp sand"

Hmm, practical concerns about acquisition aside, would lunar dust work?