Bottle show

There are limits to every idea that they test.

I'd think that the can-tap idea would be ideal for the show. It's easy, well known, could be visually 'interesting' - or at least the results could be shown in a visual way with no effort on their part. It would seem to be something that they could test very quickly (always a good thing in TV land) and if they wanted to do a little more with it they could try to show what was going on by using a transparent container or even super-size it.

True. A heavily agitated can of soda will fountain up, no matter how and how much you tap/flick it.

bio

The economic and environmental impact of disposables vs returnables is quite interesting!

In Germany, we have a high bottle and can deposit on disposables in favour to the returnable versions.

Returnable bottles don't make sense in most cases. It takes less energy and resources to make a simple disposable bottle than making expensive, durable ones which need to be shipped back to the refilling stations and cleaning them!

A glass bottle is durable and can be refilled very often - but it weights as much as its content. With disposables, you can ship twice as much liquid to the customer with the same truck and amount of spent fuel and save the return trip. You save 2/3 of shipping weight which is cheaper and more environmentally friendly.

The plastic returnable bottles are a lot lighter than glass - but very hard to clean and they need to be replaced very often.

Would be nice if the Mythbusters would investigate this for the US market.

the US uses almost NO bottles that are intended to be refilled - even our glass ones. it is apparently cheaper to melt, recast, and glue on new labels than it is to inspect, sterilize and refill them.

Washing the bottles also requires its own energy consuming processes, not to mention tons and tons of water that needs to be treated afterward. It was well intended when someone thought it up, but I'm not sure it's as sustainable as some make it out to be.

The other problem with reusing old bottles is that you have to check that the bottles are not damaged - which can only be done manually. This would drastically increase costs, even if you ignore the cost of building the facility for doing this.

Basically it is FAR more cost effective to just melt bottles down and reuse the materials, It is also, ironically, more environmentally friendly. Cleaning bottles would require a huge amount of water, which would not be drinkable afterwards. Apart from environmental concerns there are many places in the world where water is just too scarce to support such a facility - there are many US states who's water supplies are already stretched as it is. This would mean that such facilities would have to be located elsewhere...which means you would end up having to transport the empty bottles hundreds if not thousands of miles - which would more than double the fuel used by the company reusing the bottles.

Not a problem since the late 70s! You simply shine different lights through the bottle. If clear glass - or plastic - then the light simply passes the bottle and is gone. If there is any residue, cracks or broken parts, the light is scattered and can be seen by light sensors. Very simple to do even with 1970s technology! You know the fancy sings where there seems to be nothing but a plain sheet of glass and there are illuminated letters on it? That's light feed into the glass trapped until it hits a spot with an uneven surface and is scattered out of the glass. The letters are "scratched" and sometimes painted onto/into the glass and light up just like dirt or cracks in a returnable bottle does.
To determine if the bottle is safe to use and to give it a last sterilisation, hot steam is pressed into the bottle. A bad bottle blows up or at least looses pressure.

It is way more critical to check freshly made bottles - this had to be done by human eyes in the past. The real breakthrough of disposables came with computer technology able to check the shape and wall gauge using video cameras. The modern systems can check a hundred bottles per second! So for quality control, disposables cause more effort than returnable which just have to be quality checked once and from then on only quickly for dirt and cracks.

Over here, most bottle filling stations - except labels such as Coca Cola which used their own bottle design - used the very same bottles and crates:

www.adpic.de/data/picture/detail/Sprudelflaschen_Parade_14455.jpg

The bottles become returned at random and the paper label is washed off when cleaning them and a fresh one is glued on right after refilling.

What's more complicated are the plastic bottles. I remember videos of the first experimental refilling station. Lots of workers running around to stop cascades of plastic bottles jumping from the conveyor belts at random spots. Looked like fountains

In the late 80s, after plastic returnable bottles finally entered the market, I was on a canoeing trip in an environmental safe area. The river is closed to any boats but we had managed to get a special exceptional permission. In a very slow section of the river was a bottled water company which sold the water of the river in bottles. That's one of the reasons why the river is closed to public, the major other reason was the bird sanctuary. But a real canoeist can't rest until he had been travelling on every inch of river in the region. So we managed to get the permission by dragging an ornithology professor along.
Right behind the bottle filling station, the river was full of plastic bottles. A storm during the night had blown a huge stack of crates over the 15ft high fence into the river. So we took as much bottles as we could carry for the bottle deposit. But right in the middle of nowhere, there was no place to trade them in for money so we had to ask the bottle filling station. At first they were very angry since the bottles had no money deposited for them. But soon they had figured out that it would cost them more money to hire a company to clean the river than handing us the 12 Pfenning per bottle and DM3 per crate. After some hours of work - we just had to throw them to the shore where workers of the filling station were waiting with a truck, all of us had earned well over DM 400 (>>250 US$) each!

I like the Agger River. There is a dam in the River, and at specific times, they need to open it for a reason I don't know. So usually, the river is a tiny stream with lots of good even and very clean places at the shore for a BBQ. When they open the flood gates, you can ride your canoe on the peak of the flood and travel real fast and there are some interesting water falls and rapids. It's dangerous but serious fun. And you won't belief what the sudden flood washes away from people who are not familiar with this river and take a sunbath ;D

And the third seems to be to decorate the trees with used camping equipment ;D