Here is a question almost every careful Dutch household gets wrong, including — until we looked it up — us.
Where does a broken glass food container go?
The glasbak, obviously. It is glass.
No.
What the Rijksoverheid actually says
From waarzitwatin.nl, the Dutch government’s own materials guidance, produced with RIVM and the NVWA:
“Vershoudbakjes van glas gooi je bij het restafval en niet in de glasbak. Dit glas kan een andere samenstelling hebben die de glasrecycling verstoort.”
And, in the same breath:
“Metalen vershoudbakjes kunnen bij het oud ijzer.”
Read that twice, because it is genuinely counter-intuitive.
Glass food containers cannot be recycled in the Netherlands. They go in the general waste, and general waste in this country is incinerated. Steel ones go to metal recycling.
Why glass storage containers are not recyclable glass
Because they are not the same glass as a jam jar.
Food storage containers and oven dishes are usually made from borosilicate or tempered glass, engineered to survive thermal shock — a hot oven, a cold fridge — without shattering. That is a genuinely useful property, and it is why glass is a good material for the kitchen.
It is also why it ruins a batch of recycled glass. It melts at a different temperature and has a different composition. A single heat-resistant dish in a load of bottle glass can compromise the whole run. So the recycling system, sensibly, keeps it out.
The strength that makes it good in your oven is the strength that makes it useless in the glasbak.
Steel goes to oud ijzer, and actually gets used again
Steel is one of the most recycled materials on earth, and it does not degrade in the process. A steel container melted down becomes steel again — not a lower-grade substitute, not filler. The same material, indefinitely.
Ours goes in the scrap metal, and the Rijksoverheid says so.
And now the part we are obliged to tell you
If we stopped here, you would leave this page believing that steel is the greener choice.
We are not going to let you, because it is not that simple, and we would rather you heard the inconvenient half from us.
In December 2023 the Consumentenbond published research on reusable bottles and concluded, bluntly, that “rvs flessen blijken veruit het slechtst voor het milieu” — stainless steel bottles are by far the worst for the environment. Their finding: you would need to use a steel bottle for more than 36 years for its impact to match that of a reusable PE bottle.
The reason is production. Making steel is energy-intensive in a way that making plastic simply is not. That footprint is real, it is front-loaded, and no amount of end-of-life recyclability erases it.
So: we will never tell you that steel is better for the environment. The country’s most trusted consumer organisation has published the opposite, and we are not going to pick a fight with the truth to sell a container.
So what is the honest environmental argument?
It is narrower than the one you usually hear, and it rests entirely on the two things the Consumentenbond left open.
1. Time. The steel footprint is paid once, up front. The only thing that can justify it is duration — keeping the thing. A steel container used for fifteen years is a fundamentally different object from one replaced every three. This is why we guarantee the steel for ten years, and why we sell you a €4 seal instead of a new container when the seal wears out.
2. End of life. When it is finally done, it becomes steel again. The glass gets burned; the plastic gets downcycled or burned. Ours goes back into the system as the same material.
That is it. That is the entire environmental case, and it only works if you actually keep the thing.
Buying a steel container as an environmental gesture, and replacing it in two years, is worse than keeping the plastic one.
We would rather say that out loud than sell you a story.
Which is why we don’t sell steel as an eco product
We sell it because of what touches your food, and because it lasts. The recycling story is a footnote, not a headline — and where the numbers go against us, we will show you the numbers.
The glasbak fact is still true, and still worth knowing. It is just not, on its own, a reason to buy anything.
See what actually touches your food →
Food should be stored without doubt.
Sources: waarzitwatin.nl (Rijksoverheid, with RIVM and NVWA); Consumentenbond, December 2023. Municipal waste rules can vary — check your gemeente if in doubt.