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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.
I know it’s early but not a single comment about microplastics when discussing plastic vs glass? Y’all slacking.
Whatcha talkin bout Willis?
Wasn’t he like 30 when they were filming that show?
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.
The way you’ve worded that suggested to me that there isn’t an actual solution so, for the people who didn’t click through, I’ll point out that the article concludes: “more sustainable alternatives to plastic bottles exist for all three types of beverage”.
That said, in order to compare the environmental impact, there has to be some kind of weighting between the energy cost of manufacture and the direct environmental pollution (discarded plastic choking marine animals; microplastics; etc). I’m not sure it even makes sense to try to combine them. Climate change is an imminent existential threat, whereas microplastics are poisoning us but not obviously killing us.
I also wonder what they assumed for the energy source in the glass manufacture. It is mostly fossil fuels at present, but the industry is moving towards electrification.
There is no solution that involves billions of people buying things.
There is no solution that involves billions of people.
yep
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.
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.
It’s mostly just the us that no longer have recycling for bottles. Most modern countries have automated collection machines.
Recycling is explicitly mentioned in the link.
I know, what I’m saying is no glass bottle is explicitly non recyclable there’s just a lack of ability to recycle in the us for whatever dumb business monster reasoning.
Single-use bottles includes recyclable bottles. The point of single-use is that they’re discarded in some way by the consumer at the end of use, including discarded via recycling, not retained.
They’re only single use if they aren’t recycled, the article states that as well.
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.
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.
Maybe the mass produced soft drinks are the problem.
The tiny individual-use bottles, at least.
This is not entirely wrong, but the OP is about garbage and environmental pollution with it. It’s a fact that glass is basically just fancy shaped sand and turns back into normal sand with almost zero side effects, if it reaches the environment instead of being recycled.
If one makes glass with renewable energy (green hydrogen, for example) and the shipping is done with renewable energy (e.g. electric trucks), even disposable glass bottles become greener than plastics made from mineral oil can ever be.
Hmm, if we’re saying everything is done with green energy, could plastic bottles be carbon negative? Make the plastic from algie or bean feed stock so that it acts as a form of carbon capture.
Makes sense to me, but there’s still the whole microplastics issue… But honestly, at this point, anything we can do to keep fossil fuels in the ground is a win in my book. I’d love to see us go down that path for plastic needs that are both necessary and supremely difficult to replace with other materials (like medical and laboratory applications), and stop using plasitic entirely for everything else.
if it’s recycled, maybe. if it decomposes, no, because the carbon will escape again.
Plastic takes thousands of years to decompose, so wouldn’t it act as a carbon sink until then?
That is a bit outdated and only true for plastic buried in landfills. In the ocean, for example, the half life is a lot less and Comamonas testosteroni a bacteria commonly found in wastewater can break down plastic to turn it into a food source.
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.
“Send your boss and landlord to life in American prison, the special unreformed wing saved for the irredeemable who need an ironic punishment, Dante’s Inferno style”?
Is that a “straw man” I smell?
He’s literally offering you a direct rebuttal. Do you even know what the term “straw man” means?
A straw man argument is a fallacy where someone sets up and attacks a position that is not being debated.
Your meme DIRECTLY suggests a return to glass, and he literally offered up evidence that glass is not a solution because it’s actually more ruinous to the environment than plastics are.
I’m not sure this is a straw man, but I think it’s reasonable to argue that it could be considered one, given that the study talks about single-use glass whereas the meme is specifically showing a glass bottle that gets reused.
From the study itself:
Glass bottles, both virgin and recycled had high impacts compared to all other product systems, however thisdoes not consider the potential of reusing the glass bottles.
Given that page 56 shows that a brand new glass milk bottle is about 4x as impactful as their suggested alternative (carton) and a recycled one is about twice as impactful we can say that even using the lower bound of 20 mentioned in the study of reuses, the extra transport and cleaning would need to have at least 80% the impact of manufacturing a carton before reusable glass bottles could be considered worse than single-use cartons. Taking more optimistic values for glass (40 reuses of recycled glass), it’s more like 95%.
The study does mention how reuse of glass can reduce the impact:
The LCA by Mata and Costa, (2001) found that reused glass bottle schemes had far lower impacts in all tested impact categories scoped into that study, than non-re- turned glass systems. Whilst this study was undertaken under the former ISO standards, it still indicates that reuse of glass would be beneficial, especially when compared to single use glass bottles.
It talks about more complex logistics, but we have literally done this before and we still have communities that do this today. The logistics aren’t complex enough to make them unfeasible - we simply need to put in incentives that make it more profitable for businesses to include reuse in their logistics. One example of that would be a packaging waste tax. When sold by the manufacturer, a tax gets included that covers the cost of disposal of packaging. The company then gets a credit for each reuse.
Does it really? Or, do you only look at pictures when you “read.” See my recent response to PugJesus below. You commit the same logical fallacy. Sure, it’s (perhaps) a direct rebuttal to the pictures. But, the meme is more than that if you actually read the words. And, the words are the “argument.”
So, to answer your question: Yes. I understand logical fallacies well. PugJesus “sets up and attacks a position that is not being debated.”
Oh man you’re salty. It’s clear others agree. Just learn to take the L and move on. You made a shitty argument, and people pointed it out. Good game.
Is that a “straw man” I smell?
Alright, I’m sure you can explain what the meme means and how it has absolutely nothing to do with an implication that glass bottles are less environmentally ruinous than plastic. By all means, I’m all ears.
The meme shows a reusable glass bottle (the same one I get my milk delivered in, actually). The study explicitly excludes reuse of the glass bottles and notes that they’ll generally get reused 20-40 times, reducing their impact.
The 1:1 comparison, at least where I live, is of single-use “recyclable” plastic to reusable glass bottles, which this study does not do.
The straw man to which OP is referring is the specific assumption that one is replacing single use plastic with single use glass, which is a much weaker statement than what my interpretation of OP’s meme was, which includes reusing the glass.
If OP had used a glass coke bottle (for which I can’t find the same evidence of reuse, and which do have much longer logistics chains, increasing the impact of the Glass’s weight), the interpretation of single use glass would be more reasonable.
The meme has to do with “ancient tech” vs. “progress.” The pictures could be “old internet” vs enshittified internet. Or, a calculator vs chatGPT. Or, old electric cars vs tech platforms with wheels.
The point being what we often call “progress” is in fact the opposite. You know, the “words” I “actually used” in the meme … vs. the straw man you created.
Theories abound as to why toddlers are more interested in things that “defy expectation.” The bouncier, the more attraction. The shinier, the more the attraction … etc. Marketers know this well and exploit it. We’re not logical — we knee jerk react instead actually thinking about the thing in front of us.
Like assuming, without really thinking about it, that this meme is about glass vs. plastic.
No. It’s about the title. Again, the words I “said.” Which were “The Human Condition.”
Thank you for providing a stunning exemplar of my point.
Hey man, you chose the examples to push, not us.
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.
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.
I don’t think it is as urgent as the media makes it seem. For the media it is all about sensational stories. Yes long term it is something to be concerned about but it isn’t something you should freak out over.
Also if it gets bad enough some company will profit from it. If there is money to be had with solutions suddenly you get the best minds working on it.
Konvinient!
