It doesn’t take long for mold to grow on empty beer bottles. Considering beer bottles get returned for a refund, you have to assume that the brewery will make an effort to reuse as many as possible....
I doubt anyone does. I certainly do not. It would not be environmentally optimum to do so.
There is a stat that if you wash a typical dishwasher load worth of dishes by hand (with avg faucet output of 1 gallon/min), you will consume:
20 gallons of water if you are a novice
8 gallons of water if you are skilled
While a dishwashing machine uses ~4—5 gallons of water. So dishwashers are actually good for the environment. I will clear of any bulk waste before loading a dishwasher, but I do not hand rinse because it would be wasteful.
It’s essentially the same when returning bottles for reuse. People count on the industrial cleaning to do the full job (though I started the thread to get an idea of to what extent it really can be relied on). The refund for the bottle return is the same whether the bottles are clean or dirty, so there is no incentive for anyone to pre-clean them in any way.
In Europe they charge 10¢/bottle for simple bottles and 40¢/bottle for the fancy clamp-down style. Then that gets refunded when they are returned. It’s a bit of a hassle because some brewers do not participate, in which case the reverse vending machine rejects the bottle which means you then have to carry it to a glass recycle bin. The brewers that do not participate use a thinner more fragile glass that would be unfit for reuse. So consumers have to stay on their toes and keep track of which brewers participate. Can get quite tricky with the obscure artisinal brews.
Ireland is introducing the same concept for plastic bottles of charging a fee for them then returning the fee in a reverse vending machine. I can’t imagine reusing those. They must be recycling them.
I am aware that that happened in Oregon once, and even though the parts per million after one person’s bladder is empted into a tank of thousands of gallons is negligible, they emptied the whole water tank which covered a whole city and refilled it, and sent the guy a water bill for that.
I suggest watching the “how beer saved the world” documentary. It shows how they used filthy stagnant pond water with duck shit in it to brew beer, which was safe after the brewing process. But note the beer container is not part of the brewing process.
The water is not much of a risk. But filled bottles sit in warehouses with rats. Rats urinate on the bottles. This is why Europeans don’t drink directly from the bottle. I’m not sure why Americans are content drinking direct from the bottles.. maybe US warehouses are rat-free.
“Energy-smart” bricks need less power to make, are better insulation ( arstechnica.com )
Beer bottles can get quite nasty before people return them -- how good are industrial beer bottle dishwashers?
It doesn’t take long for mold to grow on empty beer bottles. Considering beer bottles get returned for a refund, you have to assume that the brewery will make an effort to reuse as many as possible....
Can cooked seeds sprout?
My city collects waste food for composting. There is /no seeds/ rule, likely because whoever uses the compost wants to control what they grow....
there’s another DiY community
There are several DiY communities in the fedi but if we ignore the big centralized instances, there is:...