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 toured a brewery once and they showed us the big industrial bottle washing machine. They said the bottles get scanned for cracks using a laser, and rejects obviously get tossed. The question is: what about mold, which adheres quite well to the corners of the glass? I wonder if the laser also detects bottles that didn’t get clean. Or if they just figure the temps would kill everything and just be considered safe enough from there.
Well, I don’t know but clearly people aren’t getting sick all the time from drinking beer. So it’s evidently safe enough. I wouldn’t worry about it.
I imagine it’s not just heat but disinfectant too.
Given glass is pretty inert they could even be using something like bleach or strong acid.
Used to home-brew. Reused lots of bottles for years.
Of course, they need to be cleaned. Most brew shops sell sanitiser which will kill anything that might cause issues.
Are people not rinsing out recyclables?
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 terms of water use dishwashers are good however the detergents available have so many surfacants added that chances are using your dishwasher is poisoning both you and waterways.
As far as I know, in the US, recycled glass is recycled, not reused, so they basically waste a lot of energy to melt the glass back down and make new bottles.
Reusing can definitely be done effectively, though. Homebrewers do it all the time with pretty safe chemicals. If you have industrial machines and chemicals, you can probably get the glass sterile, and if not sterile, then definitely close enough.
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.
