Ian Kemsley. “There’s tremendous waste, and a huge amount of money to be made by innovating.”
In fact, the glass making process has not undergone a major change since the 1850s. And the last disruptive innovation in the bottling industry came in 1903 when Michael Owens invented the automatic bottle-making machine. Today, 80 percent of the glass containers in the US are supplied by just two companies: Owens-Illinois (“OI”) and Saint-Gobain. This means that the manufacturing and distribution process is highly centralized, which increases the distance bottles must travel to reach end users. Kemsley’s new furnace design would challenge these industry stalwarts by drastically improving energy and resource efficiency in the bottle manufacturing process, while also catering to local customers to cut down on transportation requirements.
While inventing new furnace solutions may sound daunting, improving the efficacy of our glass bottle recycling programs is not. Today, 8 in 10 glass bottles end up in landfills. Meanwhile, “glass cullet” (or recycled glass) can be used in the production of new bottles, a process that has four substantial environmental benefits: energy savings, lower emissions, reduced landfill, and a reduction in quarrying. For its part, Coca Cola recently opened the largest bottle-to-bottle recycling plant to create a new revenue stream around PET chips. Similar opportunities to capitalize on recycled glass have received scant attention thus far.
But there is a more efficient way to handle used bottles…refill them. According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (“ILSR”), the market share for soft drinks in refillable glass bottles was 100 percent in the US in 1947. In 2000, that number had declined to just 1 percent. A similar decline is observed for refillable beer bottles and milk bottles are not far behind.
Meanwhile, glass beer bottles are refilled in Canada 15-20 times, and in France, a wine bottle will likely be refilled 8 times before being discarded. Among the benefits of refilling programs: higher job creation than with recycling and waste disposal, and significant energy savings. Numbers matter — it is estimated that Canada’s recovery of refillable beer bottles, other non-refillable beer containers and all associated beer packaging leads to the diversion of 1.3 million tons of beer packaging from Canadian landfills each year. This post calculates:
Refilling a bottle 10 times slashes the energy required per use to one-fifth of what’s needed to produce a new bottle every time (and one-tenth of an aluminum can), which converts into a savings of 3,140,000 tonnes of CO2.
So what accounts for differences between the US and the rest of the world? It has a lot to do with policy. Outside the US, taxes and bans on one-way containers, quotas for refillable bottles as a percentage of sales volume, and separate retail systems for refilled bottles promote bottle refilling. Aggressive marketing of one-way containers in the US is also to blame. This post cites three additional barriers that discourage refilling in the US: 1) a heavy reliance on packaging for marketing products; 2) the difficulty of managing collection and deposit refund programs; and 3) consumers’ throw-away mentality.
INFORM lists five public policy options that would encourage glass bottle refilling in the US:
- Requiring the use of generic (standardized) bottles
- Providing financial incentives for companies that switch from one-way containers to refillable bottles
- Establish broad materials policies — such as taxes on virgin materials or energy consumption
- Establishing government procurement guidelines that require or give preference to refillables
- Setting two-tier quantity based user fees for collection of recyclable and non-recyclable solid waste, giving consumers an incentive to to use refillables
Though bottle bills have proven to be a somewhat effective way to recapture used containers for recycling (and refilling in some cases), they are only part of the solution. Improving efficiency in the way we produce, package, distribute, and 