Has anyone had the experience of being told to simply throw away a glass bottle - that it's essentially made of sand, and it's much more efficient just to make a new bottle from the raw material? That's happened to me, from someone working at a restaurant. I get the feeling form this (small) story, that that's not actually entirely true. What say you, HN?
I live in a rural areal, and the local recycling center recently stopped accepting glass. Apparently the cost of transporting it to someone who has the facilities to recycle it outweighs the price the recycler will pay. For a time, the city picked up the difference, but they aren't doing that anymore.
My point is that whether or not something is economic to recycle is at least in part dependent on where that thing is. I suppose it seems obvious when put that way; but I don't think its obvious at the outset.
I don't know if this is the case, but shouldn't a lot of the transportation costs be happening regardless? The distributor ships product to a store, and when they're done offloading the product, they take the recycled products from the store back to the distributor where they're headed regardless. You'd still have to transport it to a recycling center from the distributor, but I don't see why you can't build recycling centers next to distribution centers.
