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UK's new lightweight wine bottle turns saved grams into saved ton(ne)s
The case study was about using less glass in beer bottles to reduce the cost of manufacturing and logistics as well as saving materials (better for the environment). However, argument presented was in fact that this 'green' attempt actually was less green that the older, heavier bottles.
Heres why.. THe older bottles had more glass, therefore stronger, and less likely to break. Whilst this means more materials and manufacture, the bottles collected at the end had a better chance of being recycled. The thinner bottle had a much higher tendency to break- and when crushed in the lead up to recycling, a higher volume of the crushed glass obtained were too small to be recycled, and therefore disposed of. They argued that although the initial cost of the older bottles where higher and less 'green', the new bottles proved much more difficult to recycle and generated more waste (that ended up in landfill).