Interesting Links for 20-08-2015

[andrewducker]

• From 2016 you will no longer be able to return Irn Bru bottles.
  • I'm curious as to how the economics of this work. Is it really cheaper to make new bottles than to wash old ones?
  • (tags: glass Scotland drink )
• Activision Blizzard Inc. Doesn't Need "World of Warcraft" Anymore
  • (tags: WorldOfWarcraft business )

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

I wonder if the thing with the Irn Bru bottles is along these lines.

In order to use the bottles you need to not only wash them but inspect them for cracks and chips.

So, it might be cheaper to not re-use the bottles but to melt them down and re-use the glass.

And if you're doing that, it might be cheaper just to buy recycled bottles rather than collect and recycle just your own, given that the council is collecting bottles anyway.

[a_pawson]

The main cost of refilling glass bottles is in the transport and the cleaning process. The transport is obvious - they have to be driven from shops, to distribution centres, and then to the bottling plant. The cleaning process involves the bottles being passed through hot caustic baths at 80 - 90°C. As they pass through, they are inspected for flaws, scrubbed mechanically to remove everything from the label to the date code, and then passed onto a cleaning process which removes the caustic solution. A glass sterilising plant like this has very high energy costs as the whole process is carried out at a high temperature

[andrewducker]

That makes a lot of sense. I was thinking in terms of "recycling glass vs washing glass" and actually it's "washing glass vs recycling glass vs plastic" - and clearly in those terms plastic wins by a mile.

[alitheapipkin]

They aren't switching to plastic though, they are just decommissioning their bottle washing and introducing new more efficient filling machines.

It's more like buying 100 % new bottles is cheaper than buying 50%, and transporting and washing the other 50%.

[nineveh_uk]

There's also washing/reusing plastic, which is standard in much of (possibly all) Scandinavia. Presumably the scale (and hefty deposit) helps this to work.

[fiddlingfrog]

I'm clearly visiting the wrong shops whenever I'm in Scotland as I've never seen Irn Bru in glass bottles before.

[a_pawson]

You can only get them in smaller corner stores and even there they aren't as common as they used to be.

The clink of glass in blue carrier bags is a Saturday morning tradition, as hungover people nip down the street for their paper and Bru.

[henriksdal]

Up until about ten years ago, all mixer bottles in pubs were returnable - I remember when that finished thinking sbout how much of a waste it was. Crates and crates of 175ml coke bottles used to go straight back to be refilled.

[henriksdal]

Also whatever happened with that top secret borth sea oil field? Did it exist or not?

[andrewducker]

Vorlich/Marconi. No news since October last year!