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Comment by jhawk28 | Hacker News Reader

They ask you every time you purchase something. If you don't like the plastic. Put your money where your interests are. Buy the glass bottle, ask for the paper bag. If you can't get it in that form, these things don't need to be purchased. "Market demand" is exactly how they are asking what preferences are.

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> Buy the glass bottle

Maybe go for the aluminum can instead. In the age of single-stream recycling, glass doesn't get recycled all that much more than plastic does. (Some sources suggest it gets recycled even less.) Worse, it tends to render other materials unrecyclable when it shatters and contaminates them with shards.

Also, the can weighs less, which means less pollution incidental to transportation.

While glass has recently stopped being recycled, and the transportation costs are concern, it's worth considering that glass is the most naturally recyclable of the 3 materials;

I sometimes wonder if i should crush all of my glass bottle before tossing them in the trash; or to "recycle" them more quickly, drop them somewhere in deep water; though I suppose if it were near a continental shelf, it would be even better.

I wonder if you could market a glass crushing / grinding appliance that you could keep in your garage.

Interesting! Also I have always wondered why we don't recycle styrofoam. You can dissolve it in all sorts of solvents, filter it and then evaporate and reclaim the solvent.

Expanded polystyrene is, by design, a very lightweight and flimsy material. And the very fact that it's so flimsy, and also typically used in food containers, is why nobody wants to use it: it tends to be horribly contaminated with foreign material, and is difficult to effectively clean. I'm not sure there's much of a market for a post-consumer material that consists of a mix of polystyrene and uneaten cheese.

Well for one styrofoam is neither dense nor valueable so even if said solvent stew approach could work without cleaning and filtering economically (not a given) hauling a bunch of styrofoam wouldn't be all that efficient compared to even glass let alone aluminum.

Is glass a viable alternative? It costs a lot more energy to produce than single-use plastic. It can be reused, but that requires an infrastructure of collection and cleaning. It can (and is) be (being) infinitely recycled, but that costs a lot of energy as well.

Glass bottles can avoid the 'trash' stream with 'bottle bill' legislation. Most of europe does this, some even for PET and aluminium cans. Collection is essentially the same route as delivery to the cusomers, but in reverse: the customer brings it back to the shop. The bottling plants eventually bring in their output. It's more economically all around than re-flowing the glass bottles. I know that Belgian brewers lean heavily on reused green and brown bottles. In this case, it helps that there are a few near-universal beer bottle types, but perhaps that's more a result of the reuse.

Some music festivals use '10 empty plastic cups = 1 free drink' to reduce the amount of single-use plastic trash laying around. It's simple economics.

> some even for PET and aluminium cans.

Aluminium cans are some of the best items to be recycled, as recycling one takes only 5% of the energy needed for creating one anew. This should be reflected as a higher deposit of course, to get high return rates. I think Finland achieves nowadays over 95% return rate for aluminium cans.

I like glass, but seems like the market has spoken on that one. We used to recycle (reuse, really) glass soda bottles back in the 70s and 80s. The bottles get ugly after a while, so people prefer fresh new ones. Today we still struggle to get above 50% recycling on glass, though it has been increasing over time.

Might be better to switch to aluminum. The recycling system appears more advanced.

With the industrial & urban styles currently popular (exposed building hardware, ripped jeans) you'd think worn bottles would be chic.

In the US we may have spoken but the situation has also changed, so perhaps it is time to speak again? The market may not have realized the implications and externalities of switching to plastic for say all beverages.

I for one would welcome a switch back to reusable soda and beer bottles that were collected. (see Oregon bottle deposits)

BPA coatings make aluminum problematic.

https://www.packagingdigest.com/food-packaging/most-food-can... (Most food cans no longer use BPA in their linings)

> At least 90% of today’s food cans have replaced linings that previously contained the controversial chemical bisphenol-A (BPA), according to the Can Manufacturers Institute. This is in reaction to market demands for more options in food safety.

> Food can linings now are typically made from acrylic and polyester. And all new materials are extensively tested and are cleared by regulatory agencies before being sold in the market. Linings are necessary to prevent the can from corroding, provide a barrier to bacteria and maintain food quality.

I was under the impression that many producers simply switched from BPA to BPS, and that this may not be any better for our health: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bpa-free-plastic-...

I admit I've not researched the topic much, and would love to learn that safer materials are used now.

Looking at the big picture:

Available research has left us with a reasonable idea of the bounds on BPA toxicity, and seems to indicate that, in the amounts you get from modern cans, the effect, while non-zero, is probably quite small, possibly to the point of being negligible in the grand scheme of things.

For example, the bacteria and yeast that ferment food also tend to produce all sorts of known carcinogens and toxins. I'd personally expect the fermentation by-products present in my sauerkraut to have a much bigger effect on my health than the BPA that's used to line the can it's packaged in. That seems to be borne out in the science, too, insofar as the health risks associated with eating pickles are readily observable in humans at normal consumption levels, but it seems to take obscenely large megadoses of BPA to make a lab rat sick.

Available research has also left us with a reasonable idea of the health impact of air pollution, including from diesel truck exhaust. And I would guess that the health impact from the extra air pollution produced in shipping heavier glass containers instead of lighter aluminum ones is greater than that of the BPA dose you'd get from cans' linings.

BPA is an Endocrine/hormone disruptor, these are not harmful due to toxicity. They do not follow a simple dose-responce as in, say, carcinogens. Some studies even show a higher effect at lower doses of BPA for instance.

>Is glass a viable alternative?

No. It's worse than plastic, even if the bottles are re-used rather than recycled.

http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Final%20Report%20Doo...

Giving up altogether on a product you need just because it's packaged in a way you don't agree with is not a workable solution. Choosing between otherwise similar products is viable, though.

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