Buy glass or cans - which is better?

chivers1977

I have been wondering. I recycle both glass and cans. I have to take the bottles to the bottle bank which I always combine with a trip to the park as I will be going anyway. The cans are collected every fortnight. Any idea which is better to buy in terms of the energy used to make the item and then recycle it.

We also have tetrapak recycling now but I have to drive to take those.........

IamJen

Well, I've read that it takes less energy to turn recycled metal into a usable product, than it does for glass. I'm not sure how much energy is used in the initial
product though.

Ben84

Most all cans are made from steel or aluminium now. The first obvious thing is that metal cans are significantly thinner and lighter than glass containers of the same volume, and they can be compacted to save space when transported.

As for recycling, both metal and glass have to be melted down. Aluminium melts around 1200F. Steel around 2500F. Glass around 2700F. However, adding recycled glass waste lowers the temperature needed by around 2-3% for every 10% recovered glass waste added.

As a general rule metal cans of the same volume are significantly lighter, and both steel and aluminium have lower melting points too. The energy used to recycle a container of any given volume in each material should be lower for metal, particuarly aluminium. Also, most metal cans are 100% metal and thus can be 100% recycled with no waste, while bottles/jars often have plastic or coated metal lids that are not so easy to recycle.

Metal can also be thrown away in most wheelie bin recycling schemes, but glass isn't so widely taken this way. I have to drop my glass off at the pub down the road.

Anyway, recycling anything is a positive thing as it saves some energy and avoids the environmental damage from extracting new resources, plus saving landfill space. However, reducing consumption is even better as it avoids all the energy costs, all the resource extraction, and creates no solid waste to recycle or landfill.

antenna

quite a few beverage cans are made from aluminium and steel........the body of the can is steel and the ring-pull top is made of aluminium......My company "Cash For Cans" born from Alcoa's "Cash A Can" recycled 100,s of thousands of cans in the eighties....sadly with no government support folded after a couple of years