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Comment by 24gttghh | Hacker News Reader

From the final paragraph of the article:

"If you could make a milk jug with 30 percent less material because it's mechanically better, think of the sustainability of that," he said. "You're using less plastic, less oil, you have less stuff to recycle, you have a lighter product that uses less fossil fuel to move it."

In effect this could help to reduce consumption as you suggest (and as I agree).

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The milk jug is so light and thin already, any more improvement is lost in the noise. Consume (waste) less milk, you're doing an order of magnitude more good.

Millions of pounds of plastic are made every year for milk jugs. A 30% improvement would not be lost in the noise.

Lost in the noise of producing milk. There is an astronomical amount of environmental resources to get to the point of filling the jug. Just wasting less milk (buy only what you can use to avoid dumping what has gone bad) would blow 'lighter milk jug' out of the water by many orders of magnitude. And using 30% fewer jugs saves 30% right out of the gate.

Isn't this reasoning essentially comparing a drop-in replacement with an ideal, though? Assuming this is a new technology that can actually make it through to manufacturing changes, the possible 30% reduction in plastic by using hybrid PE/PP is controlled by the relatively few milk producers and should be much more tenable than the societal change required for 30% reduction in milk use. Both reduce plastics usage, but one is a relatively quick change and the other requires change from many independent agents over a long time, so I don't understand why one is being trivialized. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Sure, go ahead and do it. But it hardly matters. We could also arrange a system to collect fingernail clippings and compost them to make fertilizer for public gardens for the poor. Its just that everybody's time is better spent on things that have larger marginal impact.

I do agree with reducing consumption in general, but less plastic per bottle certainly helps in this regard. I think drinking less or no "milk" (or any other drink) by itself is not a practical solution on its own.

Plus you may found out you are part of a population getting healthier with less milk input, and it's always good to know. It can take a lot of time to notice, and no doctor is going to advice for it but the effects can be important. It's worth a try.

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