How A Used Bottle Becomes A New Bottle, In 6 Gifs

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/06/11/190668206/how-a-used-bottle-becomes-a-new-bottle-in-6-gifs

by jellyksong • 13 years ago

157 85 13 years ago

npr.org

simonsarris• 13 years ago

Very neat.

I love that the first one is named gross.gif.

Wait a minute, one of them is named opticalsorter3.gif? Why that means...

Yes! Some bonus gifs for us!

http://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2013/06/pm-recycling/optica...

When I was a kid finding gems like that online always made me feel really clever.

X-Istence• 13 years ago

Off-topic, but related to your post. When I found out hp.com had a website at www2.hp.com I thought I had discovered the second world wide web, and I tried to go to every single other domain I knew and add www2 in front in hopes of finding out more about this second world wide web.

Ah to be young again.

ComputerGuru2• 13 years ago

For me, it was www3 on the USPTO website back in the early 90s. It seems like the site hasn't changed since then.

zaptheimpaler• 13 years ago

>When I was a kid finding gems like that online always made me feel really clever

If you haven't already, you should try notpr0n - http://notpron.org/notpron/

Its an online riddle, and a large part of it is finding those kinds of gems to figure out what to do next. I highly recommend it!

sneak• 13 years ago

weev tried this technique once.

vinhboy• 13 years ago

slow clap...

midas• 13 years ago

Most people aren't aware that the difference in energy efficiency between glass and aluminum recycling is enormous. Here are some choice quotes from National Geographic...

"each 10 percent of cullet in the mix reduces the energy required to make new [glass] containers by 2 to 3 percent"

At 70% cullet (the max), that's only 14-21% in energy savings for glass.

"creating an aluminum can out of recycled materials requires only 5 percent as much energy as creating a brand new can from bauxite ore"

That's 95% energy savings for aluminum. Big difference!

Source: http://greenliving.nationalgeographic.com/energy-recycle-gla...

Dylan168072• 13 years ago

That's because glass doesn't take a whole lot of energy in the first place. And it's not like the primary goal of recycling is energy saving.

samatman• 13 years ago

Rather, it is because electrolytic smelting of bauxite is enormously energy intensive, compared to the melting of sand, glass, or aluminum.

bcoates• 13 years ago

For glass and aluminum, energy saving is the whole game for recycling. If energy were free there'd be no recycling of either.

ars9• 13 years ago

And it's not like the primary goal of recycling is energy saving.

Really? And what is the primary goal of recycling glass then?

Fair notice: if you say conservation I'm going to laugh at you.

whyenot• 13 years ago

Glass bottle recycling could be much more efficient if we (in the US) still did what we used to do: wash and sterilize the old bottles and then reuse them. (of course, collection costs might also be higher since you need to get used bottles back to the right bottler without damaging them).

lambda2• 13 years ago

Some dairies do that, by including a $1 deposit on bottles. At $1, it's actually worth your while to collect and return the bottles to the store where you got them (likely when you go shopping for your next bottle of milk).

ars9• 13 years ago

This sounds great, but would actually hurt the environment, not help it.

Of all the things on this earth to recycle, glass is the very last one. The planet (the crust anyway) is basically made of glass. (60.2% of the earth's surface, by mass, is glass.) It's, by far, the most plentiful raw element there is. Next closest is alumina at 15.2%.

Recycle it for some energy savings? Sure. But if you are going to waste water, and heat, for it you are really doing exactly the opposite of saving energy - not only are you wasting energy, you are wasting water, and time.

Pretty much the only things worth recycling are metals.

tirant• 13 years ago

In the Netherlands glass bottle and plastic bottles,cost between 0.25€ and 0.50€ more, money you get back when you return them to the store. As a consequence of reciclying, the beer is usually cheaper when bought in glass bottles and beer crates (0.20€ - 0.30€ per 0.3L bottles) thus people usually buy those. It's a win-win situation for everyone :)

britta• 13 years ago

Popular Mechanics did a series on the economics of recycling that goes into some more detail:

"Is Recycling Worth It?": http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/recyclin...

Comparing types of material: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/recyclin...

Half-truths about recycling: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/recyclin...

And a followup, "What's the Future of Recycling After the Market's Precipitous Plunge?: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/recyclin...

mturmon• 13 years ago

Thanks for that. I learned that it's very likely that most of the stuff I put in the bin is actually recycled (except, it seems, for some plastics). I had been skeptical.

Shivetya• 13 years ago

You can find a whole days worth of entertainment by simply searching on "how X is made". Discovery Channel has a lot of entries on youtube as do other producers of similar content.

I am always fascinated by how air is used in sorting various items, from the colored glass in this application to even filtering out bad potato chips.

dorfsmay• 13 years ago

Didn't they used to wash and reuse bottles?

Are all recycled bottles re-created?

lifeformed• 13 years ago

I like the use of gifs, although it loads really poorly on my computer. Half of them don't animate, and the other ones stutter. It feels really laggy scrolling through the page.

I wish browsers could handle animated gifs better, and (from an end user perspective) make them essentially work like an embedded Vine.

anigbrowl3• 13 years ago

I hate it. It's a lazy way to avoid editing a short video and doing some narration. This is what you get when you have cameras that record quality video on the cheap but people who can't be bothered to learn any of the technique to use them effectively.

rallison• 13 years ago

I find it much more likely they went this route for the style. The photographer for these photos is Lam Thuy Vo [1] and based on her gallery, she appears to shoot with a 5D Mark II. She is obviously comfortable with a high quality camera.

[1] http://lamivo.com/index.html

gdubs2• 13 years ago

Gifs are a horrible format for video, but yet people love them for their simplicity. Vine is smartly capitalizing on this. Definitely think this was a stylistic choice here -- a narrated video is a completely different experience.

lobster_johnson2• 13 years ago

I disagree, deeply. This is simply a different medium — this is basically an illustrated article, where the illustrations happen to contain motion.

It's not that text and video are that different in terms of information, it's that they differ in timing. For example, a narrated video will likely linger on some images, then cut to something else, and so on, all the while being edited in a particular way, with a particular tempo. And video presents only one frame at a time. With text, I can choose my tempo, and since everything is presented in two dimensions I can skip or skim much more easily.

It should also be said that text can be read much faster than a narrator can give me the same amount of information. Video is seldom information-dense (in terms of useful information, not raw pixels).

prewett• 13 years ago

If there had been a video with narration I would have instantly closed the page. Video is just too information-sparse.

I thought the GIFs were tastefully done, although the bottle-top making one is confusing. Still images would have been just as good, especially for the front-end loader which isn't exactly a new concept. I did like seeing the hot glass bottles visually cool down, though.

cocoflunchy• 13 years ago

I don't know which is worse: that my computer can't load and render a simple webpage with 5 gifs, or that a webpage is so poorly optimized that it puts my laptop on it knees...

rwmj• 13 years ago

Or that your OS allows a random webpage to bring your laptop to its knees.

lambda2• 13 years ago

It played fine on my machine; but I have a brand new high-end laptop. It completely brought my phone's browser to a halt; none of the images animated, and it took seconds for it to respond to scroll events.

I find it odd that animated GIFs are suddenly in vogue again, right when HTML5 video is starting to become ubiquitous and is much more efficient and high-fidelity than a GIF could ever be.

sagarm• 13 years ago

The GIFs total 30MB (!), but as videos[1] they're 1-2MB total. That's a 15x-30x reduction in size.

Surely that large of a reduction in bandwidth and improvement in user experience is worth it?

[1] To get the frames of the GIFs: for i in "* .gif"; do convert $i -coalesce $(basename $i .gif)-%02d.png; done

And encode them to webm: for i in "* .gif"; do ffmpeg -f image2 -r 30 -i $(basename $i .gif)-%02d.png -vcodec libvpx -b 1M -crf 5 $(basename $i .gif).webm; done

ajtaylor2• 13 years ago

The gifs are some of the best ones I've ever seen. They are almost perfectly seamless!

trhaynes• 13 years ago

Sounds like you would enjoy cinemagraphs. For example: http://annstreetstudio.com/category/cinemagraphs/

akent• 13 years ago

Thanks for the link. Particularly interesting is the Q&A post where they discuss HTML5 vs GIF http://annstreetstudio.com/2011/12/22/the-other-half/

ajtaylor2• 13 years ago

Thank you for the link. I'm going to have fun looking back through all their posts.

stephen• 13 years ago

It astounds me that the costs of these plants (plus the costs of getting the raw/recycled material there) can be amortized to some fraction of the $2 we pay for a bottled beverage.

lostlogin• 13 years ago

A few things a like that. I get 1L bottles of a tomato pasta sauce I like. It costs about US $2. It tastes good and has a custom bottle for the brand. How do they do it? I couldn't grow the ingredients from seed for that price as the seeds alone would exceed that cost. Then making the sauce, the bottle, then shipping.

kintamanimatt2• 13 years ago

You're paying retail for the seeds, etc. They aren't.

justinator• 13 years ago

Has anyone had the experience of being told to simply throw away a glass bottle - that it's essentially made of sand, and it's much more efficient just to make a new bottle from the raw material? That's happened to me, from someone working at a restaurant. I get the feeling form this (small) story, that that's not actually entirely true. What say you, HN?

NovemberWest• 13 years ago

Recycling is a good thing, the opinions of waiters (or what not) not withstanding.

Maybe restaurant employees aren't the best source of info on the topic.

ars9• 13 years ago

Recycling metal is a good thing. For everything else it's usually bad for the environment, and sometimes neutral. Rarely positive.

Glass should just be tossed.

Burning everything else (i.e. paper and plastic) for energy (with a good filter) is probably the best option.

repiret• 13 years ago

I live in a rural areal, and the local recycling center recently stopped accepting glass. Apparently the cost of transporting it to someone who has the facilities to recycle it outweighs the price the recycler will pay. For a time, the city picked up the difference, but they aren't doing that anymore.

My point is that whether or not something is economic to recycle is at least in part dependent on where that thing is. I suppose it seems obvious when put that way; but I don't think its obvious at the outset.

suby• 13 years ago

I don't know if this is the case, but shouldn't a lot of the transportation costs be happening regardless? The distributor ships product to a store, and when they're done offloading the product, they take the recycled products from the store back to the distributor where they're headed regardless. You'd still have to transport it to a recycling center from the distributor, but I don't see why you can't build recycling centers next to distribution centers.

lobster_johnson2• 13 years ago

See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5909844.

ars9• 13 years ago

It's pretty much true. It saves a small amount of energy, but the cost of collecting, sorting and cleaning the glass can leave you in the negative.

Of all things in the world glass is the very last one that needs recycling. See my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5910322

reledi• 13 years ago

Of all things in the world glass is the very last one that needs recycling.

I agree but for a different reason. Glass is easy to reuse if the bottle is still intact.

tren• 13 years ago

If you like this you may be interested in a new waste disposal system being trialled in my city (Perth, Australia) - http://www.anaeco.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view.... It basically takes general household garbage diverting approximately 70-85% of it from landfill. Plastics, glass, metals and biodegradable organic matter are automatically separated out at different stages and the whole plant uses biogas generated from the organic matter to generate power (excess power is fed back into the grid).

arvidj• 13 years ago

(We wanted to take a picture of the furnace, but they warned us that it was so hot that getting close to it could destroy our camera lens. Which makes sense, given that it was hot enough to melt glass.)

In that case, wouldn't the furnace also be hot enough to melt the photographer?

shabble• 13 years ago

People working near are likely to be wearing suits something like [1]. I'm not sure if there are any fundamental constraints to putting a camera inside a similar shielded enclosure, but I imagine it could be possible that the camera lenses might focus the light sufficiently to damage the CCD. Then again, the bulk of energy is presumably in the IR, which isn't particularly well transmitted through glass (and hence, would be absorbed instead, maybe damaging it or any expensive coatings it has)

[1] http://www.lakeland.com/h900.shtml

ygra• 13 years ago

This reminds me a lot of How it's made, except the video is in looping GIFs and the narration is in text form in between.

joelthelion• 13 years ago

Almost no human interaction.

The concept of a "job" for everyone is going to become obsolete very soon.

chii2• 13 years ago

it just means that one person is capable of producing a lot more by designing smart machines, instead of manual labour. The engineering/thought going into the design is still a job.

Imagine if the entire world didn't need manual labour - what would/could happen? Is it possible that all humans work on abstract things like designing stuff (programmgin/engineering/produce entertainment for others)?

corford• 13 years ago

I loved the last two gifs. That's an office! Makes the typical startup place look like an infantile playground :)

KurtMueller• 13 years ago

Please play this youtube video while you browse this article. It enhances the effect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9-7uLg-DZU

pikewood• 13 years ago

Is there a reason other than aesthetics that glass needs to be sorted? Do the chemical colorants not work well together, or is the glass types incompatible with each other? Wouldn't multi-colored glass that looks obviously recycled be a product that would be attractive to "green-conscious" companies?

How A Used Bottle Becomes A New Bottle, In 6 Gifs

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