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Comment by Grazester | Hacker News Reader

Yes with the glass bottles please.

In the Caribbean Soda use to come in glass bottle with a $0.50 deposit. You would never find a bottle on the side of the street, kids lamented losing their deposit if they broke a bottle(also ran the risk of getting yourself cut if you did) so they made sure to hold on to those bottles with both hands. Now soda comes in a plastic bottle with no deposit on it and isn't recycled on the island. The side of roads and nearby bushes are filled with these plastic bottles. Drains are clogged with them. Its an absolute nuisance. I dont know why the government even allowed the switch over to plastic....Ok I lied, I know. the glass bottles were costly to the breweries and they are the government biggest campaign supporters.

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If what you care about is pollution, just tax the pollution instead mandating a specific solution. In this case, it seems easier to add a $0.50 deposit to the plastic bottles.

Money is not a solution for poor culture.

Technically it is a solution, but it sounds like you don't like it for cultural reasons.

This gets into the purpose of governments in general. Culturally, let's say you don't want pollution. How do you solve that? You can try and convince your neighbors piecemeal, or you can create a governmental solution. Governments have a relatively limited set of options for creating change. Taxes are one of the least invasive options, and significantly lighter weight than regulation and police enforcement.

Isn't that a problem that could be solved with law enforcement and cleaners like what developed countries do? That still seems to be cheaper than glass bottles.

Yes there are law's against littering and that doesn't mean much. I live in New York City(in a "developed" country). Yet some streets can become pretty littered.

The glass bottle made the people police themselves instead of having the governments use public resources to do it.

Cheaper is not the measure of everything. Glass bottles, returned and re-used are much better for the environment than plastic bottles.

Also for your health - lots of plastic bottles are not so stable and less so, in heat. So you end up drinking small amounts of plastic and additives.

Also, and this is only anecdata, drinks in glass bottles seem to taste so much better for some reason.

more anecdata - I have the same experience, I cannot tell if it is in my head [0] or there is actually a difference

[0] for example some people claim food tastes different based on weight of their utensils etc... It is hard for me to accept my brain is not tricking me when drinks in glass taste better than can/plastic of the same drink

> It is hard for me to accept my brain is not tricking me when drinks in glass taste better than can/plastic of the same drink

Although we use the word "taste" to describe the experience, even that is well understood to be a methaphor for taste and smell.

What's more, I think it's also pretty well understood that texture is an important component of how people perceive (dare I say "taste"?) what they eat.

As such, I don't think you need to resort to accusing your brain of trickery to conclude a different experience when drinking from a can or from bottles of different composition.

On the other hand, if they're both first poured into identical glass highballs before being consumed.. that's another matter.

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