this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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I wouldn't call it a silly issue myself. I'd ban all plastic packaging unless proven to have no alternative. I'm also infiuriated with countries for making easily recyclable materials actively hard to recycle: speaking of glass. They make it so you have to take it to a recycling point, which can be sparse depending on your idea. Glass and metals are amazing for recycling. But no, make everything plastic and actively push people away from purchasing glass by making them have to go out of their way to recycle it. Plastic bottles frequently aren't even better. I had multiple plastic sauce bottles break akin to glass and leak out.
Yes! Which is why my idea is to have a collection point at every point of sale. And the first aim will be to reuse the packaging, not even recycle it (melt it down)! This is why ISO standardization is necessary - you don't want to keep track of Coke bottles and Pepsi bottles, they need to be identical. The same truck that delivers a pallet of bottles from the factory to your store will take the pallet of empties out.
I cannot agree on the reuse. The amount of CO2 emited from the extra transportation and water wasted on cleaning, plus the possibility of lower sanitary quality all add into it making less sense than recycling, but perhaps I'm wrong and those are of lesser negative value than the process of recycling.
The numbers I heard is that reusing a bottle is less energy intensive than melting it down. It's sanitary if you sterilize it properly by heating to >100°C, which is still much less energy than heating it to 1723°C to melt. As for water, I try to think on a 100 year time scale, where water is a renewable resource, but plastic is not.
It's true that the energy savings will be wasted if you end up trucking the pallet of glass soda bottles all the way across America! But you shouldn't be trucking bottles that far anyway - you should be sending rail tanker cars full of syrup to a bottling plant in each state and use local water to mix it.