We have plastic bottles because CocaCola did not want to collect and reuse the glass ones.
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2024
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And because the eminently recyclable aluminum cans are somehow not good enough.
The aluminum ones have a plastic liner, and aluminum is cheap to make - recycling is incomparable to reuse, and a world away from reduce
Yikes, I had no idea. Please tell me there's nothing wrong with glass bottles.
It depends on the bottle, but they're also more work to recycle than make new ones. Even with us running low on usable sand - there's companies turning glass back into sand at this point
The upside is you can sterilize and reuse them, and if you make them a little thicker they're pretty strong
There's more environmental consequences to single use plastic beverage container manufacturing as well. The raw plastic gets shipped to the manufacturer, the manufacturer injection molds what are called "preforms" then those get put into a blowmolder which uses very high pressure compressed air to form the bottles. This uses an incredible amount of electricity to run the compressors. Then the plastic bottles might get shipped to the bottling plant empty, then the filled bottles get shipped to a distribution warehouse, then they get shipped to the retailer. Pure insanity, especially if it's bottled water.