How Drinking Beer Can Help Save The Enviorment

Glass bottles on the beach are a known sight and not much is done to get rid of them besides picking them up or having recycle bins for the public to use.  A machine that New Zealand has adopted turns glass bottles into sand a very high speed. The idea comes from the incentive to keep beaches clean and address the shortage of sand. If bottles can be turned into sand it saves money while producing a usable substance.  The selling slogan for this campaign is “The answer to the sand shortage could be to drink beer”. This not only helps reduce the amount of space glass bottles take in trash or recycling but makes it into an enjoying experience as you can watch the machine turn the glass bottle into sand in five seconds. It also keeps the beaches free from glass and can be placed in front of bars so that it can be more convenient to find and use. The sand collected can be used for other purposes such as use in construction or sold independently. 

The picture above shows a rough life cycle of where the recycled glass goes and how it’s turned into sand. With this machine implemented, it will cut the portion of the amount of resources needed to recycle normally. This will not stop the need to recycle glass but add to the ways we can obtain sand and recycle. The rapid expansion of cities has created a demand for construction and more construction means more sand is needed to make it happen. The question often raised is why don’t we just take sand from the desserts? The answer to this is that the sand is different as the sand from the dessert is shaped from the wind rather than the ocean. The cost of getting sand from crushing rocks and minerals takes too many resources and is expensive. Thus other means of obtaining sand is greatly needed and can serve a dual purpose of helping keep beaches clean.

·     http://www.geek.com/tech/machine-crushes-beer-bottles-into-sand-to-save-new-zealand-beaches-1690917/

·        https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/23/opinion/the-worlds-disappearing-sand.html?_r=0