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Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

I want the phrase "carbon footprint" to die a horrible death. Please. soon.

Come on though, this isn't hacker news. It's a square bottle - eg a carton. Which doesn't make any sense for a bottle of drink. Uncomfortable to hold, it looks idiotic. It's a non starter.

Also by making the bottle square, you're actually using more bottle material than you need to - cylinder is the most efficient shape to hold contents. Way to waste plastic...

I would also guess that manufacturing a square bottle is far harder and takes more effort/power/"carbon" than manufacturing a round one.

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The elephant in the room is that shipping bottles of carbonated corn syrup around the world will never be "eco-friendly" no matter how much effort invested in the packaging.

There is no such elephant. The Coca-Cola Company ships bottles of concentrated syrup around the world, but dilutes, bottles, and carbonates it at hundreds of plants around the world. (Possibly even thousands, actually -- there are apparently 300 "bottling partners", and I imagine many of them have multiple plants.)

Forgive me my choice of words. I erred by going for an image, rather than for strict accuracy.

Look out your window. Do you see a bottling factory? Then that can of carbonated corn syrup got shipped to you, probably over some distance. That is not "green" by any stretch of the imagination.

By the way, I'm not knocking people for enjoying carbonated beverages. They just shouldn't claim they're being "green" by e.g., recycling the container, or making the container in a slightly different fashion.

that can of carbonated corn syrup got shipped to you, probably over some distance

True. Of course, the water which comes out of your tap travelled some distance, too. The water in the diet coke I drink travelled, from reservoir to bottling plant to distribution plant to store to me, a total distance of under 100 km. Compare that to someone drinking tap water in Phoenix, and tell me who has the greater environmental impact.

For once in my life, I agree with you 100%. "carbon footprint" my ass.

Glass bottles had a lower carbon footprint because you could wash them out and they were as good as new. Plastic in a landfill is plastic in a landfill. Forever.

> Plastic in a landfill is plastic in a landfill. Forever.

Glass in a landfill is glass in a landfill, forever, too. The benefits of recycling requires the actual recycling part. PET, from which soda bottles are made, is recyclable, much lighter than glass, and much easier to re-shape. The used bottles are basically shredded, melted and re-cast.

Except for the experience of drinking an ice-cold Coke from a glass-bottle, PET bottles are pretty much universally a better choice.

To strengthen your argument, you need to provide a machine that will wash and refill a coke bottle. Otherwise you are simply sending some glass to the landfill (lazy customers) and some to recycling.

The very machine you mention can be found... In the past! Soft drinks, like milk and juice bottles, used to be reused and refilled. I guess it was cheaper to fire all deliverymen and not run refilling machines when bottles could be made out of thin, throwaway plastic instead.

Most soft drink bottles still say "non-refillable" on them, even though no refilling services exist, even if you wanted to.

I was actually thinking of a machine where you insert your bottle and a screen lowers. It then does a quick scan to confirm it is a bottle of the correct dimensions and weight. It lowers a rod into the bottle and steam-sterilises it. It bakes the outside of the bottle so the bottle reaches >100 degrees for several seconds.

It then chills the bottle. It could do this by pumping refrigerated water into the bottle and then extracting it again.

Finally, it rolls a label onto the outside of the bottle and fills it with a refreshing beverage. Optionally, it could then seal the bottle.

This machine is then installed like a vending machine, but with far greater capacity (it could mix drinks with filtered water on site) and lower cost.

Oh, you're talking about the future! That's far more awesome.

You could just return an empty bottle every time you buy a new one (or pay a deposit if you don't have one). Oh wait, that already exists (doesn't sound as cool, though).

That requires the infrastructure, storage and carbon to transport the bottles somewhere else to be refilled. In the end you still end up storing filled bottles on site.

Glass Coke bottles are still sold in South America (in my country Uruguay for instance).

Even more, most people agree that it is "tastier" (just because it keeps cold better I suspect, and I hope it's not because something from the plastic container seeps into it!)

No, it's tastier in third world countries because they use real sugar instead of HFCS: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/magazine/11fob-consumed-t....

Not just in developing nations...you can get glass bottles of Coke in the US made with real sugar as well.

... but most commonly they are imported from Mexico.

Refillable bottles (plastic or glass) are widely used in Chile. I'm quite surprised to see that the concept doesn't seem to exist in the US.

I'd bet people are far more likely to recycle glass, than plastic.

Plastic in a landfill is plastic in a landfill.

Indeed, but in some (most?) countries plastic is recycled too (or incinerated, there's no reason to put it in a hole in the ground).

The energy cost of washing glass exceeds the energy cost of making a new plastic bottle.

Actually a sphere should be the most efficient shape. Scuttles off and starts designing a spherical coke bottle.

Ever see the Coke Christmas ornament bottles? http://www.yumsugar.com/2009-Coca-Cola-Round-Holiday-Ornamen...

They wouldn't fit in standard cup holders though. For some reason, I feel shipping a soccer ball sized bottle of coke would be less efficient than the current design

A sphere is most efficient on a per bottle basis, but that doesn't necessarily hold up when shipping them in rectangular containers.

Fiji water does OK with a rectangular bottle. Wal-Mart / Costco do OK with a rectangular 1-gallon milk carton (which they implemented solely for cost). Johnnie Walker has been utilizing a rectangular shape for nearly two centuries, originally implemented for ease of shipping.

This isn't a radical or new idea, but still a good one. Even better would be to use biodegradable plastics, but that's not an idea that saves money.

Fiji, milk, and whisky are not pressurized like a carbonated soda.

I'm not entirely certain what manufacturing process is used to make Coke bottles but if they use blow moulding, which is very common, then it is simply a case of making a different shaped mould. I don't see why that would require any more effort, and it seems unlikely that it would require any more power/"carbon".

What about the rest of the process? Labeling machines, filling machines, packing machines etc etc. These are pretty much all used to round bottles.

That hadn't occured to me. On a large scale operation like producing Coke wouldn't these costs be quickly diluted by the large volume of containers that they are producing? Or do Coca-Cola contract many smaller companies that would have to change equipment individualy?

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