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.
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
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
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.
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.
... would you care to quote that, because I'm pretty sure it says otherwise.
They only counted recyclable bottles as single use if discarded anywhere but a recycling center assuming they may or may not be recycled so they assume it's trash until it's recycled or degraded.
That's literally not what the quote says.
That's exactly what it says.
Let's break it down.
"But as these bottles are largely single-use" - does not define 'single-use' but implies that the following statement is about single-use bottles
"many of them are discarded and dumped in the earth’s ecosystems, where they constitute a significant portion of all environmental waste." - says that many of the aforementioned are dumped and constitute environmental waste.
That's it. That's the entirety of the quote you provided.
Where do you get that single-use is defined as only the unrecycled bottles from THAT?
That is the definition....., they're used a single time and dumped into the environment. That's what single use plastics are, I've legit never heard of anyone aside from you refer to glass as single use.
They say glass new and recycled but accept that a large amount of glass bottles still end up in the ecosystem.
I didn't say it defined single use glass, that's just a you thing. It defines sickle use for the article in which it is used solely to describe items that are used once and dumped into the ecosystem. It is specifically never referred to in reference to glass in the article.
Jesus Christ.
No, my name's Dan.
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.
Maybe the mass produced soft drinks are the problem.
The tiny individual-use bottles, at least.
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.
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.
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.
"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"?
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.
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?
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:
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:
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.
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.