I know it's early but not a single comment about microplastics when discussing plastic vs glass? Y'all slacking.
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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As we all know, glass bottles are definitely not environmentally ruinous
"Return to tradition" may be tempting to some, but it's not an actual solution.
A study comparing the environmental impacts of various single-use beverage containers has concluded that glass bottles have a greater overall impact than plastic bottles
But... but... Glass is not single use. That is the whole point. I don't like this article.
If you have single use bottles, aluminum like soda cans is lowest impact. But any reusable solution (meal, plastic, or glass) is much much better.
What about the plastic lining in the can?
I think that's a whole lot less plastic than if it was the whole thing.
a lot less. we're talking ~2 microns (ie: 2 micrometers or 0.002mm). For context, the width of an "average" human hair ranges from 18 to 180 microns (there's a lot of variability due to age, ethnicity, and lifestyle).
If you want to see for yourself, you can dissolve the aluminum to leave just the lining (scrub any paint off the outside of the can first). You can use a solution with pH either lower than 3 or higher than 12.5. For context, draino is about 12 on the pH scale, and coca-cola is about 2.5, but the closer you are to neutral, the longer it will take (so while you could theoretically use the soda inside the can, that will take quite a while). There are sulfuric acid drain cleaners that get down into the 1 to 2 pH range (though note that pH is a log scale, so that's on the order of 10 to 100 times more acidic than the cola and will fuck your shit up if you aren't careful).
For whatever you choose to use, be sure to look up safe handling and disposal recommendations before attempting, or simply watch this youtube video instead!
Sure, but it's plastic in addition to the aluminium can. Might be better overall but not exactly ground breaking ecologically speaking.
Must be profitable, though, or they would have disappeared
But… but… Glass is not single use.
When used for mass-produced beverages it very much is. Hell, plenty of beverages still use disposable glass bottles today, and that's not even getting into the fact that glass bottles use to be the standard, which is part of the reason why there's so much nostalgia around them.
In the same vein, plastic is not inherently single-use. If we're comparing multi-use plastic and multi-use glass, then the same calculus applies.
But in the meme it’s the kind of milk bottle you return to the store for $ and they wash and refill it. Not really covered by that study I don’t think
glass bottles have a more damaging overall effect, largely because they are heavier and require more energy for their production.
Lots of countries have deposits on bottles and they will very much be reused. If that's not being done it's a cultural/political problem not a glass bottle problem.
It's mostly just the us that no longer have recycling for bottles. Most modern countries have automated collection machines.
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Maybe the mass produced soft drinks are the problem.
The tiny individual-use bottles, at least.
I've yet to see a reusable plastic milk bottle. The glass bottle pictured is literally one that you return to the store for a deposit and they return to the dairy, where it gets sterilised and reused. These are quite common where I live, and the plastic alternative is single-use "recyclable" plastic.
Except for the past 100 years glass recycling and re-use has been a net loss, on who pays for it, who wants to do it, who still just throws stuff out, and how it's implemented. Back in the 70's, when soda was in glass, something like 3% of the bottles were being returned.
There is no solution that involves billions of people buying things.
There is no solution that involves billions of people.
yep
Why are tetrapacks so good?
I assumed they were terrible as laminated paper can't be recycled?
As I write this I start to think this might be one of those things I learned in high school that might be total BS.
Probably that ultimately even disposing of laminated paper is more environmentally friendly than the process of recycling energy-intensive materials like glass and plastic.
That's because we didn't move to nuclear like we should have 20-30 years ago+.
There's no excuse to be burning coal or oil at this point, at least in first world countries that have the money.
We're hitting issues with energy use because we didn't take the upgrade path for our energy production that we were given because money.
Eat your boss (sexually), and pat your landlord on the head. Or whatever it is that doesn't piss the .world mods off.
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I think it's worth pointing out here that there are some major downsides to glass.
Weight. Glass is heavy, more weight means more energy (and emissions) required to transport it, and a lower product mass to packaging mass ratio.
Durability. Glass bottles have to be much thicker than plastic bottles to achieve the same strength, which means thicker glass and/or additional packaging is required to get the product to the consumer.
It would be interesting to see the total life cycle emissions for packaging types, and to figure out how many re-uses (if any) are required for a glass bottle to offset its pollution footprint compared to a disposable vs recycled plastic bottle.
I can't really advocate for plastic/aluminum/glass packaging, since I'm not aware of a study the considers the total footprint for each.
Ideally, we'd purchase our own containers, and then fill our own containers from a local bulk supply. Minimizing the weight and distance traveled while maximizing re-use is key.
The ideal solution you propose was often used when we used glass.
The only reason we could have started throwing our containers is because plastic is so much cheaper.
To be fair, when we used glass, fewer product were transported long distance.
Nowadays we can do like Germany who incentives to bring back bottles for recycling.
Or an even better alternative would be to use glass for individuals and another method for transportation.
Although i've seen some bio stores starting to refill plastic containers, wich isn't perfect but a nice middle ground to start changing habits.
We should also switch away from liquid based detergents. My partner gets liquid dishwasher detergent, and it bugs me a bit because we're paying extra money, and buying extra plastic, just to ship a dilute version of the powder that I'd rather buy.
I agree with all of your points, but the original picture was showing plastic pollution and you went on to compare it with carbon emissions. So when you use a phrase like "total footprint" it's difficult to interpret that any other way than we must make one problem worse to solve the other.
I don't see why we can't have solutions that are low/zero carbon AND don't result in plastic being dumped in the ocean.
Is the goal to reduce plastic, or is the goal to live as long and sustainably as possible on the only known rock that can support human life?
But I see it as two sides of the same coin. Plastic or glass, we're not getting at the core problem, which is long distance, packaging intensive transportation of goods. Plastic is bad because it becomes trash, and eventually a pollutant. Glass may have less pollution in the product, but more pollution in the distribution.
Again, I agree. Rather than blindly reducing energy usage and/or reducing plastic pollution we should be looking towards any solution that works towards holistic sustainable living across the planet.
The only statement that I would debate is: "Glass may have less pollution in the product, but more pollution in the distribution."
The pollution in the distribution is currently carbon based output from fossil fuels, but it doesn't have to be. Also, the glass can be efficiently re-used in some cases. In the UK we used to have milk distributed in glass bottles, delivered by people on electric "milk floats", who collected the empties as they delivered the full ones every day. The bottles didn't get melted down, just washed and refilled. It seems possible to me that we could get that process to almost zero carbon whilst also using zero plastic.
That's one example, but a single holistic solution to both carbon output and low waste is probably not possible. To achieve the global sustainability that we all want will take different and innovative solutions in each use case.
I guess the OP's meme makes sense in some cases and not others, depending on perspective.
Reusable plastic bottles or metal are great, it's the single use plastics that are really terrible.
The banning of plastic bag sees the rise of reusable bag...being taken as single use. Multiple times higher footprint, multiple times higher cost. People will do everything for their own convenient.
Except that a recent study shows that a plastic bag charge in the UK significantly changed behaviors:
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00266/full
So the suggestion that people are unchangeable is plausible, but turns out to not be true.
Whereas I miss the old Aldi "single use" plastic bags because I'd use them a few dozen times (not necessarily at Aldi) before they either got holes or a strap broke or something. I've still some stashed in places for when I need a decent plastic bag to hold something.
I think realizing that there is a problem is the first step to fixing it.
I remember seeing really old papers posted here where our current climate problems were being forecasted as early as 1920.
BP invented the carbon footprint term in an (successful) attempt to shift responsibility to the consumer in about 1990 I believe.
We're way past realisation and spreading the word.
This is pure ignorance we're fighting today.
The problem was realized decades ago, and yet we've accelerated our use. It's very similar to emissions. If only we had left that thick sludge in the ground, neither of these would be an issue.
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Konvinient!
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