I think the best approach for glass bottles, because of the energy issue, is to sterilize and reuse them instead of recycling them. This used to be done with milk bottles, I believe, and is still done at some grocery stores. Basically after finishing the beverage you’d return the bottle and collect some kind of deposit.
Recycling aluminum is reasonably efficient from an energy perspective.
used to be done for all carbonated drink bottles.
with returnables the bottler pays the shipping both ways for heavy walled bottles.
with disposables the bottler pays the shipping one way for a thinner walled bottle.
Why? Silicones were a nice addition to the world of polymers. They have higher temperature capability, make clean and inert low durometer elastomers, offer some of the smallest surface energies, resist ozone, and give enormous extensions and flex lives. Why wouldn’t making polymers with other backbone elements do similarly new and useful things for us?
Gutta Percha and latex rubber are natural polymers – that is, plastics by any real definition.
I think things would have been a lot harder without plastics. We did well enough without most of them until the 20th century, and aside from bakelite and a few others, they didn’t really take over consumer culture until the 1940s or so, but they’ve really taken off since then. For electronics, mechanics, and medical applications it would be difficult to imagine the modern world. If you go whole hog and toss out gutta percha, latex rubber, and cellophane, I have a hard time imagining any reasonable way to make a lot of items we’ve taken for granted – no rubber gloves, nipples for baby bottles, electrical insulation (for everything from low-voltage wires to power-carrying cables to oceanic telephone cables), tops for droppers, conduits for transfusions and saline drips, hoses for cars, gaskets for sealing, relief chambers, condoms and diaphragms.
Cloth insulation and ceramic beads on wires? Cloth tips on baby bottles (as they used to use), silk condoms, wax for lots of applications, corks for sealing, ground glass on stoppers? Life’d be a helluva lot different.
The main purpose of plastics in medical applications seems to be to make things cheaply so that they can be disposed of after a single use. Example, a scalpel with a metal edge embedded in a plastic handle. We can go back to reusable implements and autoclaves; it would be more expensive, but could be done without plastics.
Not true – what would you use for hoses for saline drips and blood transfusions? What would replace silicones in various implants (silicones are used in a huge variety of implants going way beyond breast implants) and the like?
even if you replaced it all with rubber (a plastic, as I note), what about people who are allergic to latex (my wife is)?