Re:Tips from Poland on Old-School Zero Waste (2019)
by 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 on Sunday February 02, 2020 @09:52PM
(#22221043)
It’s an excellent idea. The question I always have is “can they work this out without the heavy hand of the government?”
Re:Tips from Poland on Old-School Zero Waste (2019)
by Teever on Sunday February 02, 2020 @09:58PM
(#22221066)
If the end result is the same, or nearly so, does it really matter except for personal ideological purposes?
Re:Tips from Poland on Old-School Zero Waste (2019)
by Polylactic_acid on Sunday February 02, 2020 @08:53PM
(#22220817)
In this case you really do have to get the system absolutely perfect, not just good. It is unacceptable for someone to receive a bottle that contains any amount of dirt or other contaminant.
I'm not an expert in this so idk how difficult it is to ensure this but unless the system is perfect it can't be used.
Re:Tips from Poland on Old-School Zero Waste (2019)
by jacobush on Sunday February 02, 2020 @09:06PM
(#22220868)
It has worked with glass bottles in Sweden for I know many decades, maybe a century, unsure. Unfortunately glass bottle usage is down and plastic usage is up.
Re:Tips from Poland on Old-School Zero Waste (2019)
by sgift on Monday February 03, 2020 @08:11AM
(#22223804)
The German mineral water industry started using a standardized glass bottle in 1969, all of these are reused: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normbrunnenflasche
If we could do it 50 years ago, we can do it now. It's a solved problem.
Re:Tips from Poland on Old-School Zero Waste (2019)
by TeMPOraL on Monday February 03, 2020 @02:50AM
(#22222253)
You don't have to make the system perfect. You have to make it cautious. At any time it suspects a bottle may be too dirty or not getting cleaned for some reason, it should reroute it to manual inspection line and/or straight to remelting. So now you lose 30% of your yield, but the rest is clean and sterile. That's a good starting state, from which then you can optimize the contaminant detection.
For HN readers, this is an example of "don't make perfect the enemy of good."
If even 10% of the bottles were nasty, there are machines that can handle that.
Just like Europe's progress in standardizing chargers, we need to go back to standard bottle sizes.
One of the best examples is the Beer Store in Ontario, Canada. All brewers have to use stubby brown bottles, and achieved 99% reuse in modern times:
"Between 2013-2014, the Beer Store achieved a system-wide recovery and re-use rate of 99 per cent for the industry standard bottles, which are reused 12 to 15 times."
They accomplished such phenomenal reuse that the bottles wore out. So much for excuses, eh?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beer_Store