Bring back the bottle banks

That seems to be the message from the British Glass Manufacturers' Confederation on June 16th. If we put our bottles in the recycling box for commingled processing, very little of the glass is used to manufacture new bottles, it ends up in the foundations for roads instead. Their press release says:

“The result is that the cullet is not only being colour mixed, it is also being compacted and mixed with the other materials, possibly making the end product less suitable for new containers. The cullet from such activities is not only potentially unsuitable for container manufacture but could also affect fibre applications. The result is it is only suitable for low grade applications such as aggregate from which little or no carbon benefit is derived.”

The British Glass Manufacturers have been to visit the North London Waste Authority and explain this. So says Councillor George Allan, who has just stepped down from the NLWA Committee. He says that the glass in the recycling bins also contaminates the paper making that fairly low value as well.

The EC recycling targets have been a good thing in that recycling rates have been forced up. However, in carbon terms, the old system of sorting everything into different bins ourselves had a lot going for it.