How Green is my Glass?

Hey Mr. Green,

Do glass bottles actually get recycled? My understanding is that if brown and green glass gets mixed, it has no value except as fill for roads. If glass bottles do get recycled, what do they get made into?

 

-William in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania

 

Thanks for the opportunity to disprove another pesky urban legend from contrarians who consider it their mission to debunk environmentalists. Actually, the biggest problem with recycled glass is that there's not enough of it. We recycle only 25 percent of the glass in the U.S. solid-waste stream, a national disgrace, considering the landfill space and energy we'd save with more recycling.

About 70 percent of recycled glass goes into new containers or useful products like fiberglass insulation. Glass separated by color is preferable to mixed, since neither green nor brown can be used to make clear glass. To save space, bottles are crushed into cullet, which is melted back into "new" glass. If the cullet is too mixed or contaminated, some is, alas, dumped, but it also winds up in all sorts of items: beads, tiles, countertops, frictionators (a neat word for match tips), highway reflectors, and, yes, road aggregate.

Only 11 states have bottle-deposit laws, thanks to opposition from corporations and trade associations. States with the economic incentive of deposits average a 63 percent recycling rate, compared with a puny 12 percent in states without, says the Container Recycling Institute.

CRI's Web site (container-recycling.org) displays a counter tallying how many cans and bottles have been littered, incinerated, or sent to landfills since January 1, and it's shocking to see the numbers fly by. In mid-July, we were already at 69 billion; 182,000 more got tossed while I typed these last two sentences!

Paper or Pixels?

  

Hey Mr. Green,

I'm a professor, and one of my students lauded me as "the greenest person" she knows. Then she said she bought an e-reader and wasn't buying any more books. I couldn't help but wonder if, in fact, such devices are environmentally wise. Surely it takes a lot of energy to create, power, and dispose of them. What's your analysis?

 

-Peter in Macomb, Illinois

 

You shouldn't rush out to buy an e-reader in the belief that you're saving the world. You'd have to read somewhere from 20 to 60 books on one just to offset the global-warming emissions created by making and using the device, according to the studies I've seen.

So, for a serious bookworm, e-books can be more energy efficient than hard copies. But if you read superslowly or spend hours pondering paragraphs, your e-reader may fall behind, as it does require extra energy. To put things in perspective, though, neither e-readers nor books rival other energy sinks. Drive five miles to the bookstore and back, and you'll use more energy than it takes to make a book.

But there's a wild card in all this, namely the library card. My numbers are based on a single use of a book. Yet each time somebody reads a library book, its environmental burden is reduced, because its production requires only a onetime resource use, whereas the e-device needs power for each use. Moreover, paper books can survive hundreds of years and readings; the e-reader, if it has its ancestors' DNA, is doomed to a comparatively brief existence.

Hence, as Nicholson Baker concluded in his cantankerous book about books, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, it may be premature to wantonly abandon paper tomes. And there will always be a place for public libraries.

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