Letter - Glass Is Greener - Letter - NYTimes.com
Glass Is Greener To the Editor:
Re “Drink Outside the Box,” by Tyler Colman (Op-Ed, Aug. 18):
Without a doubt, glass bottles are greener than wine boxes.
Calculating a carbon footprint based solely on trucking capacity is myopic and fails to consider the carbon costs for extraction and manufacturing.
Just envision the various elements that have to go into creating a wine box. It involves many more steps, materials and energy inputs than are required for making a glass bottle.
As for recycling, most communities can handle glass, which is 100 percent recyclable. Good luck finding programs that handle wine boxes.
The choice is clear: glass is greener.
Joseph J. Cattaneo
President
Glass Packaging Institute
Alexandria, Va., Aug. 19, 2008
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Which is greener?
From the New York Times:
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4 comments:
It takes a very very large amount of emergy to melt glass to make a bottle. Glass plants are very big producers of green house gasses (NOx, SO2, CO2, H2SO4, . . .)
My town's recycling program accepts cardboard, but doesn't accept colored glass. The program where my brother lives doesn't accept glass at all.
> Without a doubt, glass bottles are greener than wine boxes
This is counterintuitive and I would believe it only after having seen the numbers. That the author had to add "Without a doubt" makes me actually more doubtful of his claim. Show me, don't pose.
The Glass in Denver, according to a 2009 westword article, is often used as "clean cover" for our landfill. It's spread over the day's refuse to keep it from blowing away or being eaten by animals. That's considered recycling.
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