FYI cans have a plastic liner to prevent acidic foods from dissolving the aluminium, so there’s still some plastic in it (much less then fully plastic bottles tho)
We should really advance to “glass only” for single use containers (unless you have a really good reason to prefer plastic, like if it’s a medical product) and invest in the infrastructure to recycle them - a country can get up to a 99% recycle rate for glass if it puts the work in.
Yes glass is potentially less safe but my gut tells me that the risk of more broken glass is offset by the reduced air pollution and associated health risks.
There’s no perfect solution, which is why we have a lot of options.
But in the category of “single use drinking containers”, all of the options besides glass carry with them more and worse externalities than what glass production and recycling carries. Which is why “having a lot of options” isn’t a positive in this case, it just means that a large part of the market is operating in a way that is more destructive to society than it needs to be.
I dunno. it takes a lot more heat to melt and recycle some glass that plastic. that and the transport weight is a whole lot of extra environmental cost.
and the whole separating by color thing in the recycling bins.
best bet is to reuse the bottles for the same beverage by rinsing them back at the original bottling plant but that is a logistics nightmare
it’s not a logistics nightmare, we used to do that until plastic gave us the idea of single use containers, many restaurants still do it with larger 1L bottles
also, while yes glass does have a really high melting point, most plastics never get recycled and instead get burnt, releasing a lot of toxic chemicals in the air (and even if they weren’t, you can only recycle some types of plastics, and even if you did, new objects can be made only by some percentage of recycled plastic, and never 100%)
FYI cans have a plastic liner to prevent acidic foods from dissolving the aluminium, so there’s still some plastic in it (much less then fully plastic bottles tho)
We should really advance to “glass only” for single use containers (unless you have a really good reason to prefer plastic, like if it’s a medical product) and invest in the infrastructure to recycle them - a country can get up to a 99% recycle rate for glass if it puts the work in.
Yes glass is potentially less safe but my gut tells me that the risk of more broken glass is offset by the reduced air pollution and associated health risks.
It’s more that it’s heavier, so you have to transport a lot more weight for the same amount of product.
Secondary to that, glass can’t be shaped as compactly as an aluminum can or plastic bottle, so it takes up more room for the same amount of product.
There’s no perfect solution, which is why we have a lot of options.
But in the category of “single use drinking containers”, all of the options besides glass carry with them more and worse externalities than what glass production and recycling carries. Which is why “having a lot of options” isn’t a positive in this case, it just means that a large part of the market is operating in a way that is more destructive to society than it needs to be.
I dunno. it takes a lot more heat to melt and recycle some glass that plastic. that and the transport weight is a whole lot of extra environmental cost.
and the whole separating by color thing in the recycling bins. best bet is to reuse the bottles for the same beverage by rinsing them back at the original bottling plant but that is a logistics nightmare
it’s not a logistics nightmare, we used to do that until plastic gave us the idea of single use containers, many restaurants still do it with larger 1L bottles
also, while yes glass does have a really high melting point, most plastics never get recycled and instead get burnt, releasing a lot of toxic chemicals in the air (and even if they weren’t, you can only recycle some types of plastics, and even if you did, new objects can be made only by some percentage of recycled plastic, and never 100%)
What about Tetra paks?
Aren’t they as equally unrecycleable as plastic?
I can’t even put them in my recycling bin…which is where the glass and plastic goes.
I’m curious as to how the math works out comparing fuel burned per unit of product delivered for each container medium.