How Beer Bottles Are Recycled
When you take your beer bottles back to the bottle depot in Calgary, you may wonder what happens to them afterwards. There are really two main possibilities. The first is that they are cleaned and reused. The second is that they are crushed and used to make new glass products. Both processes are quite different.
#1 — Reused as a beer bottle
The first way that beer bottles are recycled is to be used again for beer!
The beer bottles are collected at the bottle depot in Calgary, then transported to various breweries for reuse. The bottles are checked to ensure they are solid and not broked or fractured at all. Then they are washed and sanitized using high heat and a solution to kill off any bacteria. Then they are refilled with beer, pasteurized and sent back out to a store near you for consumption. After you drink the beer and return the bottle to the bottle depot, it goes through this process as many times as possible until the bottle becomes damaged and can’t be used any more.
#2 — Made into new glass products
The other alternative if a beer bottle is broken or not strong enough to be used again is to send it to a glass processing plant to be made into new glass products.
When glass arrives at a recycling plant, it is sorted by colour to ensure that new recycled products are as pure as possible. This makes them stronger and less likely to break.
Once the glass is sorted, it’s washed. That’s when the breaking begins. In order to be recycled, glass has to be crushed to make a raw material called cullet. Glass manufacturers love cullet. It’s cheaper than the raw materials they’d need to make new glass. It also melts at a lower temperature that saves energy during the production process.
Glass manufacturers mix cullet with other materials like limestone, sand and soda ash. Then they heat it to over 2600º F. This makes liquid glass, which can then be poured into any type of mold. When it cools, the finished glass product is now created.
Most recycled glass is used to make new glass containers, such as jars and bottles. However, recycled glass can also be used to make fiberglass insulation, ceramic tiles and a variety of construction products.
When you choose to bring your glass beer bottles back to the bottle depot in Calgary, it gives us the opportunity to reuse the raw materials they were made of. This means that new materials isn’t being sourced and less energy is used overall. This is, of course, better for the environment and for consumers. Recycling glass bottles is just one of the ways we can do better for our environment by throwing away less materials and reusing the ones we source as much as possible. Though there are many other ways this can be done, glass is one of the easiest items to reuse and it uses the least amount of energy to recycle.
