What do you guys do with your broken and common bottles?

[linnea810]

I usually take common and cracked bottles home with me, like ketchup and condiment bottles and jars, etc. to clean and recycle. I'd rather do this than leave them at the dump. What do you guys usually do with common bottles? I've heard that a lot of people just leave them at their dumpsite.

 

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[bottlehunterofcoscob]

While I'd really like to take all the garbage out there and recycle the stuff I don't want to save, unfortunately too often the volume is much too great and it's impossible to carry out even a portion of the trash with all the gear and finds I do want to take home. This is especially true for my typical style of bottle hunting which is going out in the mud with waders. All I take is a backpack and small shovel and it can still be a struggle to be going through deep mud. Luckily, I believe glass is not nearly as harmful as a lot of other garbage, as it degrades comparatively quickly compared to the other garbage we produce nowadays. But when I can I take home some stuff to throw in the recycling bin. It's a good plan if you can do it!

 

[NJKLAGT]

Personally I just rebury them.

Glass is actually probably the least harmful waste that we create, and if it's already in one place there in a little dump on the side of a hill, it won't do too much to affect plant and animal life. And even though we might get tired of finding countless ketchup bottles from the 1950s, someone might enjoy digging those years from now, so I try not to break the bottles that I don't want for myself!

 

[2screwed]

And even though we might get tired of finding countless ketchup bottles from the 1950s, someone might enjoy digging those years from now, so I try not to break the bottles that I don't want for myself!

That's the same thing I do and the same reason I put mine back in the hole. 50 or 100 years from now someone might be as thrilled to find those ketchup bottles as we are to get into a layer of 1800's trash today.

 

[NJKLAGT]

I always wonder about that...

When we pull two of the same bottle out and they're around 100 years old and late-blown or early machine-made, we see a lot of differences between the two depending on where the bubbles in the glass ended up or how the colour differs slightly or how messy the tooling is, etc.. But, when people 100 years from now pull out a 1950s ketchup, yeah they're gonna be like, "oh my gosh, this thing is 150 years old!" but when they pull out another and it's the same ketchup bottle, it will look virtually identical to the first. No bubbles, no colour, no fun stuff.

What I'm saying is that even though I tell myself I'm a good person for leaving those ketchups for future diggers, I think those future diggers are still gonna hate digging 1950s ketchups! Haha! So next time you're reburying those ketchups, take the opportunity to work on your evil grin!