Featured Found an Interesting Article about Murano Glass and Gas Availabilty

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/01/30/murano-glass-gas-crisis/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https://s2.washingtonpost.com/car-ln-tr/35e67fa/61f6c03b9d2fda14d712c9b5/5d7ef15fade4e23eccb736ee/48/72/61f6c03b9d2fda14d712c9b5

Hope it's not behind a pay wall. It reminds me a little of the problems Fenton had with the cost of natural gas to run the furnaces. The article says that glass makers are facing a 400% increase in gas prices. Many companies shut due to Covid and loss of business. It's a little frightening.

 

There's been some pioneering work done with glass furnaces here by Richard Golding. He was doing it for environmental reasons, but fuel prices make it even more urgent.

http://www.abfabglass.co.uk/page40.html

 

Wineries and beer brewers are having trouble getting enough bottles here. The orchard I get my weekly dose of cider from is running out of their preferred bottles too, even though they request that customers return the empties (and pay you $1 for them!)

 

This is really sad!
Love the photo on the link though

 

Fascinating how there are so many subjects all rolled into this article - art, tourism, the economy, climate change, global politics. We live in interesting times!

 

I expect that more industries dependent on natural gas to make their product will go back to paying for empties.

About time too. Glass in nature and landfills is already too ubiquotous. Time to recycle like we did years ago.

My first few years in school (in Sweden) included many class trips we children financed with return monies for bottles, and newspapers too. We had semi-annual school rally runs for this.

I remember running up and down thousands of steps in local apartment buildings, ringing door bells and begging the old ladies and gents for their empties!

It got to be such a tradition that the residents saved their empties especially for us children instead of personally taking them back. They gave us each just so many bottles per student so they'd be fair to all.

Many school trips to museums in other big cities were paid for that way. Also for a wonderful visit to a glass blowing factory, one of my favorite memories.

In an example of "it's a small world", I was given a figurine by my stepsons for a birthday when I was in my forties here in the U.S.

It had a paper label on the back: Reijmyre Glasbruk. The very factory I had visited with my classmates when I was 10! You and I can visit it today too, from the link, the site is in English (with some Swedish words).

I'd welcome a return of glass bottles, it could mean an income for children for one and lessen the fill in landfills too.

 

Returned bottles are often recycled by melting. Not reused.

 

Where does it say that in my post? We school kids knew back then that the glass bottles were melted down. Perhaps I ought to have included that as important.

 

As a child, we too used to turn in glass bottles for money. It was mostly soda bottles for which we received about 2 - 5 cents depending on the size. After that we would take the money to the penny candy section. This would have been in the 50s.

 

Melting glass to recycle it uses as much energy as making it in the first place. So it's pretty pointless in that respect.

We've separate recycleable bin collections here.

 

The glass recycling market here in the US is still pretty dead from what I understand. Many communities pay for recycling only for the items to end up in a landfill due to the lack of market value. For soda cans I collect mine and put them in a plastic grocery bag. Once I week I hang them on my back fence on the alley for the down and out to pick up and turn in. It keeps them from rummaging through my trash can. Oddly enough I don't use many glass containers anymore. Most are now plastic.