New Years Day. Well we all gave, “You and me, we can light up the world, …” a 110% arms up hammering and hip flicked to Beyonce’s “I’m a dinner lady, you’re a dinner lady. I’m a dinner lady, you’re a dinner lady.” We ate our way through several packets of Sainsbury’s micro morsels and emptied umpteen bottles of beverage which, being good green souls, we will take to the bottle bank along with morsel wrappings, coke cans etc.
Now a cava bottle weighs around 3lbs and our weekly bottle bank run weight is around 15kg. So say there are 15m families in the UK like us, that’s 225m kg of bottles a week and 11,700,000,000 kg per year. OK so far?
The specific heat of glass is 0.2 calories per gm per *C temperature rise and the melting point of glass is 1,500*C so the heat needed to melt 1kg of glass is 1239293 joules, which equates to 0.35 kwatt hrs. Thus the energy needed to re-melt the UK’s recycled glass bottles is 4,000,000,000 kilowatt hours per annum or 4 trillion watts (I think) or about 15% of the output of the Drax power station. Now the Drax power station outputs 22 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year so our recycled bottles accounts for 3,300,000 tonnes of CO2 or 0.5% of our total yearly emissions.
Enter Bottle Station. Simply take your own everlasting high tech polycarbonate bottles to a Bottle Station, dial up what you want it filled with, press a button and replace the cap.
Right, all together, arms up, “You and me, we can light up the world, …”
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