

How A Used Bottle Becomes A New Bottle, In 6 Gifs - jellyksong
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/06/11/190668206/how-a-used-bottle-becomes-a-new-bottle-in-6-gifs

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simonsarris
Very neat.

I love that the first one is named _gross.gif_.

Wait a minute, one of them is named _opticalsorter3.gif?_ Why that means...

Yes! Some bonus gifs for us!

[http://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2013/06/pm-
recycling/optica...](http://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2013/06/pm-
recycling/opticalsorter.gif)

[http://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2013/06/pm-
recycling/optica...](http://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2013/06/pm-
recycling/opticalsorter2.gif)

When I was a kid finding gems like that online always made me feel really
clever.

~~~
X-Istence
Off-topic, but related to your post. When I found out hp.com had a website at
www2.hp.com I thought I had discovered the second world wide web, and I tried
to go to every single other domain I knew and add www2 in front in hopes of
finding out more about this second world wide web.

Ah to be young again.

~~~
ComputerGuru
For me, it was www3 on the USPTO website back in the early 90s. It seems like
the site hasn't changed since then.

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midas
Most people aren't aware that the difference in energy efficiency between
glass and aluminum recycling is enormous. Here are some choice quotes from
National Geographic...

"each 10 percent of cullet in the mix reduces the energy required to make new
[glass] containers by 2 to 3 percent"

At 70% cullet (the max), that's only 14-21% in energy savings for glass.

"creating an aluminum can out of recycled materials requires only 5 percent as
much energy as creating a brand new can from bauxite ore"

That's 95% energy savings for aluminum. Big difference!

Source: [http://greenliving.nationalgeographic.com/energy-recycle-
gla...](http://greenliving.nationalgeographic.com/energy-recycle-glass-
bottles-vs-aluminum-cans-vs-plastic-2376.html)

~~~
whyenot
Glass bottle recycling could be much more efficient if we (in the US) still
did what we used to do: wash and sterilize the old bottles and then reuse
them. (of course, collection costs might also be higher since you need to get
used bottles back to the right bottler without damaging them).

~~~
lambda
Some dairies do that, by including a $1 deposit on bottles. At $1, it's
actually worth your while to collect and return the bottles to the store where
you got them (likely when you go shopping for your next bottle of milk).

~~~
vidarh
Norway has a bottle tax ranging from 0.5 to 2.5 NOK I think (been a while
since I lived in Norway; 2.5NOK is roughly 43 cents), and a recycling rate for
glass bottles of something like 99%.

The key, in addition to the bottle tax, is automated bottle collection
machines in pretty much all grocery stores that'll issue receipts to be used
to offset against purchases at the till. It's so convenient most people return
them, and the bottle tax ensures most of those that gets thrown away gets
picked up by kids or poorer people for the money.

Most undamaged glass bottles would be returned to bottlers by volume rather
than origin, for washing and reuse, apart from Coke bottles for obvious
reasons.

Though these days most of the bottles are still plastic, but are still largely
recycled - even if the energy savings isn't all that huge, it still saves a
lot of landfill space.

~~~
LeonidasXIV
In Germany shopw have to charge you 25 eurocent when you buy a plastic bottle
which they will return when you bring the bottle back.

No such thing exists for glass bottles but they do get recycled. There are
even separate recycle bins for white, brown and green glass. Yes, germans take
trash separation seriously (on a related note, people in Japan too).

~~~
Samuel_Michon
I think you’re missing the point. It’s ‘reusing’ versus ’recycling’. When you
throw bottles in a recycling bin, you can’t reuse them because they’re broken.
It then takes a lot of energy to turn them into new bottles. It’s a lot better
to keep the bottles intact, clean them, and fill them again. That’s what a few
countries have chosen to do. The way it’s done in Germany is unfortunately a
lot more common.

~~~
LeonidasXIV
Actually, Germany does both. The 25ct thing is a more recent development.

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lifeformed
I like the use of gifs, although it loads really poorly on my computer. Half
of them don't animate, and the other ones stutter. It feels really laggy
scrolling through the page.

I wish browsers could handle animated gifs better, and (from an end user
perspective) make them essentially work like an embedded Vine.

~~~
anigbrowl
I hate it. It's a lazy way to avoid editing a short video and doing some
narration. This is what you get when you have cameras that record quality
video on the cheap but people who can't be bothered to learn any of the
technique to use them effectively.

~~~
lobster_johnson
I disagree, deeply. This is simply a different medium — this is basically an
illustrated article, where the illustrations happen to contain motion.

It's not that text and video are that different in terms of information, it's
that they differ in timing. For example, a narrated video will likely linger
on some images, then cut to something else, and so on, all the while being
edited in a particular way, with a particular tempo. And video presents only
one frame at a time. With text, I can choose my tempo, and since everything is
presented in two dimensions I can skip or skim much more easily.

It should also be said that text can be read much faster than a narrator can
give me the same amount of information. Video is seldom information-dense (in
terms of useful information, not raw pixels).

~~~
anigbrowl
_ACHILLES: You are right on both counts. But even though the record is there
"all at once," as you put it, we can draw sounds out of it bi by bit. The idea
behind this is that the grooves pass slowly under the needle, and as they
pass, the needle vibrates slightly in response to those very fine designs you
earlier referred to. Somehow, in those designs are coded musical sounds, which
are processed and passed on to the loudspeaker, to dispense to our waiting
ears. Thus we manage to hear the music just as you said, "a bit at a time."
The whole process is quite marvelous, I should say.

TORTOISE: Well, it is marvelously complicated, I'll grant you that. But why
don't you do as I do just hang the record up on your wall and enjoy its beauty
all at once, instead of in small pieces doled out ove a period of time? Is it
that somehow there is a masochistic pleasure in the pain of doling out its
beauties so slowly? I am always against masochism._

Douglas Hofstadter, _Godel, Escher, Bach_

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justinator
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?

~~~
repiret
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.

~~~
suby
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.

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arvidj
> (We wanted to take a picture of the furnace, but they warned us that it was
> so hot that getting close to it could destroy our camera lens. Which makes
> sense, given that it was hot enough to melt glass.)

In that case, wouldn't the furnace also be hot enough to melt the
photographer?

~~~
shabble
People working near are likely to be wearing suits something like [1]. I'm not
sure if there are any fundamental constraints to putting a camera inside a
similar shielded enclosure, but I imagine it could be possible that the camera
lenses might focus the light sufficiently to damage the CCD. Then again, the
bulk of energy is presumably in the IR, which isn't particularly well
transmitted through glass (and hence, would be absorbed instead, maybe
damaging it or any expensive coatings it has)

[1] [http://www.lakeland.com/h900.shtml](http://www.lakeland.com/h900.shtml)

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stephen
It astounds me that the costs of these plants (plus the costs of getting the
raw/recycled material there) can be amortized to some fraction of the $2 we
pay for a bottled beverage.

~~~
lostlogin
A few things a like that. I get 1L bottles of a tomato pasta sauce I like. It
costs about US $2. It tastes good and has a custom bottle for the brand. How
do they do it? I couldn't grow the ingredients from seed for that price as the
seeds alone would exceed that cost. Then making the sauce, the bottle, then
shipping.

~~~
kintamanimatt
You're paying retail for the seeds, etc. They aren't.

~~~
chii
but the point still stands - sure the seeds might've only cost you a few cents
(or even, free if you know a nice farmer who'll give you some). But think
about the time it takes to grow, and the amount of effort required to grow
enough to make one jar of tomato sauce...

~~~
kintamanimatt
Economies of scale, short supply chains, and automation. It's not really all
that surprising.

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tren
If you like this you may be interested in a new waste disposal system being
trialled in my city (Perth, Australia) -
[http://www.anaeco.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view...](http://www.anaeco.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=82&Itemid=55).
It basically takes general household garbage diverting approximately 70-85% of
it from landfill. Plastics, glass, metals and biodegradable organic matter are
automatically separated out at different stages and the whole plant uses
biogas generated from the organic matter to generate power (excess power is
fed back into the grid).

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ygra
This reminds me a lot of _How it 's made_, except the video is in looping GIFs
and the narration is in text form in between.

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pikewood
Is there a reason other than aesthetics that glass needs to be sorted? Do the
chemical colorants not work well together, or is the glass types incompatible
with each other? Wouldn't multi-colored glass that looks obviously recycled be
a product that would be attractive to "green-conscious" companies?

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joelthelion
Almost no human interaction.

The concept of a "job" for everyone is going to become obsolete very soon.

~~~
chii
it just means that one person is capable of producing a lot more by designing
smart machines, instead of manual labour. The engineering/thought going into
the design is still a job.

Imagine if the entire world didn't need manual labour - what would/could
happen? Is it possible that all humans work on abstract things like designing
stuff (programmgin/engineering/produce entertainment for others)?

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ajtaylor
The gifs are some of the best ones I've ever seen. They are almost perfectly
seamless!

~~~
trhaynes
Sounds like you would enjoy cinemagraphs. For example:
[http://annstreetstudio.com/category/cinemagraphs/](http://annstreetstudio.com/category/cinemagraphs/)

~~~
akent
Thanks for the link. Particularly interesting is the Q&A post where they
discuss HTML5 vs GIF [http://annstreetstudio.com/2011/12/22/the-other-
half/](http://annstreetstudio.com/2011/12/22/the-other-half/)

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KurtMueller
Please play this youtube video while you browse this article. It enhances the
effect.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9-7uLg-
DZU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9-7uLg-DZU)

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corford
I loved the last two gifs. That's an office! Makes the typical startup place
look like an infantile playground :)

