Weight and the associated extra fuel costs to transport the weight. The cost of sterilizing and sorting the bottles. Breakage and transportation of the bottles. If they are being recycled, it wouldn’t matter if it was broken glass but it takes a lot of energy to recycle.
Yeah, there is a lot of cost with glass and reuse, which is why soda bottling companies ditched the classic 10 oz and 26 oz bottles in favor of plastic, which was cheaper, lighter weight, more resilient, and they didn’t have to deal with sorting and sterilizing. For the soda companies and bottlers, plastic is all upside, and the externalities of litter and pollution is Somebody Else’s Problem.
Clear glass can be ground up, remelted, and reused essentially indefinitely, but all of the processing takes more energy than just using virgin sand so until we started running into availability of glass-quality sand there was little effort to recycle it. Until the recent awareness of the hazards of plastic, glass was basically for hipsters, craft beer, home canning, and people who drink overpriced flavored tea. The beverage industry still isn’t inclined to move back to it en masse and especially not if it requires reuse.
Stranger
I think you can find bottled water sold in glass bottles; possibly Perrier or Pelligrino.
Yes, but usually these are 750 ml, not the half gallon bottles I remember.
Have you actually looked at how bottled water is processed? They get the water from named springs and then run it through their RO system. Then they add their special mix of salts and minerals so that each bottle has the same trademark taste.
Bottled water is horrible for the environment and for cats, dogs and humans. Our pets have been on RO water for almost 30 years by vet advice and our current vet thinks that our porcelain pet fountains are the best we can do for our furry overlords.
If you want to do a little research, look at Nestle water and the horrible things that are happening to the environment through them.
shudders
I normally drink tap water and I use a Brita filter for making tea or coffee to reduce the amount of mineral deposits.
For hiking I use metal flasks. And I buy sparkling water in returnable glass bottles.
Neither my husband nor I like drinking out of plastic and consider it a necessary evil when flying as the tap water offered at most airports is vile. If possible, we’ll pour the water into a glass for drinking.
My company no longer provides bottled water for meetings. There are glass carafes and glasses which can be filled with chilled, plain or carbonated water at every coffee corner.
Even in the cafeteria there are carafes of water and glasses at every table, so there’s no need to wait in line to get water before or after getting your food.
Reduce, reuse and then recycle.
Large glass bottles are heavy and expensive - that’s probably why.
When I lived in Iowa City, which has gross water to this day, I used, and then later inherited when she moved out, a 5-gallon plastic bottle on a tipple thing so we didn’t have to lift it all the time, and we would refill it at the grocery store as needed.
[quote=“Stranger_On_A_Train, post:53, topic:1001141”]
And just to make this completely clear, there is no “more effective recycling” of most plastics, something that is well understood by polymer science engineers and is not amenable to hypothetical advances in recycling technology.[/quote]
Stranger
Or, redrink someone’s germs.
Nope. Don’t trust carafes and drinking glasses in public.
I buy Path water in a metal bottle that I reuse.
I buy plastic bottled water, for the house and take the empties to the recycling center (aka The Dump)
Occasionally they’re open. Occasionally they accept recyclables, they always charge $7-12. Which is non-refundable after they inspect and take nothing off your truck.
We have no trash pick-up. It’s burn it or try like hell to recycle.
I have to say I try very hard to keep the plastic stuff bought, in packaging and items themselves down as low as I can. Burning plastic in a burn barrel doesn’t sit well with me.
It doesn’t sit at all well with your lungs or anybody else’s. At the temperature ranges attainable in a burn barrel plastics give off dioxins. Please don’t.
I don’t.
The odd thing has gotten in. But 99% of the time we don’t.
Or cans. None! And, I mean it, I’m talkin’ to you Son-of-a-wrek!!
(My most hated things are plastic shopping bags and solo cups)
Yes, and you can also find screw top cans about 16oz, of aluminum, which are the best for keeping water in your car.
Not so much in the winter, as they’re liable to burst when they freeze.
Be so hot here, you couldn’t touch it til the next day.
there certainly may be some leaching of the plastic into the water (as well as some hydrolysis as mentioned by Stranger), but the largest influence on the change in the structural integrity of the bottles that you are seeing is probably water absorption into the polymer itself (i.e. the penetration of water into the interstitial spaces between the polymer chains).
What is Path water?
Buy a full bottle and then refill it until it gets damaged or lost. That’s what I used to do at work. I’d refill it with water cooler water.
Thanks for that article. I’m always interested in good information from reputable sources.
But frankly I do have some issues with that article. First of all, it attacks the feasibility of pyrolysis as a miracle solution to plastic recycling. So I assume that someone somewhere has made that claim, but personally I’ve never heard it. Pyrolysis is generally regarded as a potentially useful method for creating synthetic fuels, not as a panacea for plastic recycling. The huge headlines and imagery in that article seem rather disturbingly sensationalist and support the idea that it’s actually attacking a straw man.
My other issue here is that my community and all the communities around me, and indeed communities all over the world, are pushing hard for recycling. Taken at face value, your commentary seems to imply that the whole world is spending billions of dollars on recycling programs that are basically a scam.
Here’s a small blurb from the nearest big city to where I live:
Last year, 100,939 tonnes of recycling collected through the Blue Bin program was sold to markets to be made into something new. Some statistics circulating over the past few years suggest that nothing actually gets recycled, and that plastics in particular have very low recycling rates. While recycling rates vary across different sectors, it’s important to note that residential recycling rates are typically much higher than those in the industrial, institutional and commercial sector. The City’s recycling rates overall and for plastics are actually quite high. The majority of the items (87% in 2021) put in the Blue Bin that are supposed to be there (i.e. accepted in the program) are recovered and shipped to markets to be made into something new. However, there is still the issue of a lot of material being put into Blue Bins that shouldn’t be (items not accepted in the recycling program). This is called recycling contamination.
I really have to reject as completely implausible the implication that recycling is a fraud and it all goes into landfill. But is it just plastics? Paper, glass, and metal cans are fine but plastics can’t be recycled? That seems odd, too, because in reading about acceptable plastics for recycling, criteria vary from one place to another, and there are also some commonalities – for instance, “black plastic” is not considered recyclable. And, interestingly, frozen food containers that used to be black plastic are now almost universally white or clear plastic. There is surely some useful activity happening here.
Interesting hypothesis that sounds very plausible, thank you!
What is this “freeze” you speak of? 