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Comment by pen2l | Hacker News Reader

This might be a dumb question, but: why don't we do glass-style bottles? I live in America now, but when I used to live in Pakistan 20 years ago, I remember that I would buy pepsi or coki in a glass bottle... and if I wanted to buy a second one, I would go back to the store and give them the old empty bottle, and they would compensate me a few pennies for it -- and the bottle then is presumably washed and reused. It's simple, fun, and environmentally friendly. Why don't we do this with... milk, juice, etc.? Why not do this with everything really?

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The US was gearing up nicely to require deposit and reuse schemes in the 50s or 60s. Vermont was about to require drinks be in reusable bottles.

Pepsi, Coke, Budweiser, Philip Morris and others got together, conceived the idea of, funded and launched "Keep America Beautiful". Vermont was lobbied and the deposit scheme died, consumers were blamed for the whole problem via campaigns on littering, and industry could do whatever the hell they liked.

Greenwashing was born.

Bottle and can deposit has been going on in Massachusetts since at least the 80's (when I was growing up there) - https://www.mass.gov/deposit-bottle-can-recycling

I'm putting words in NeedsMoreTea's mouth here, but I think he was referring not to deposit schemes, but deposit and reuse schemes.

In the 70s and 80s, soft drinks (at least in California where I lived) were packaged in really heavy, thick glass bottles. You paid a deposit on purchase, and a refund on turning it back in, and then the bottles were cleaned and reused.

These schemes have seemingly all disappeared. Many or most states still have deposit programs, but the intent is to recycle the glass, not to reuse the original bottle.

Glass recycling is pretty efficient and effective though—it could well make more sense (from a combined financial and environmental perspective) to recycle glass than to sterilize and re-use existing bottles.

I like to explore ghost towns and old mines, and one of the things that always strikes me about the leftover trash is how thick and sturdy bottles were 100+ years ago. It's a nice visual reminder of just how disposable most products are in the modern west.

Exactly so. As I understand it, the Vermont plan was drinks in containers that weren't being refilled were going to be banned. So wash and reuse or you ain't selling that beer. :)

Reused glass milk and pop bottles here in the UK didn't seem different in weight or thickness to non-returnable bottles of the same era. They've all got thinner over the years. The oldest milk bottles I can remember, from the 70s, were indeed quite chunky but they'd mostly gone by the 80s. No idea how long they'd been around though.

The last fizzy pop refilling scheme I know of died about 5 years ago, leaving just a few dairies using it for milk.

Reuse is typically only used for big water jugs and glass milk bottles.

Soda bottle deposits are effective and don’t get shipped off to poor countries.

On the other hand, up until about the late 1970s or early 80s, Coke and Pepsi in the US were typically sold in eight-packs of 16 fl. oz. returnable bottles. These were returned to the store, which refunded the deposit on the bottles, and the delivery trucks would take the empties back to the bottling plant to be cleaned and reused. The bottoms of old-school Coke bottles were stamped with their original bottling plant, as well, although bottles often turned up far from their original plants.

No need for laws, but then Big Soft Drink got greedy and pushed for the disposable mess we're now stuck with, because, hey, no more money spent on washing bottles.

I think it's about time more state legislatures enact bottle deposits. I've noticed that highways in Michigan ($0.10 bottle deposit) are a hell of a lot cleaner than in Illinois (no bottle deposit).

Because of industry lobbying: https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2017/11/06/packaging-indust...

They are bribing our politicians so that they would not be prevented from poisoning our world. 'Enemy' is too kind a word for such people.

There is a company called Loop that is shipping and re-using packaging. Much of it is aluminum. (Personally I'm looking forward to laundry detergent not coming in an extremely thick single-use plastic thing I know will end up in a landfill.)

Glass is very heavy relative to other materials so you've got to include the added shipping weight into CO2 calculations. Glass makes a lot of sense for things you don't buy very often where the ratio of product-use-count vs weight is high (condiments, cleaning products, personal-hygiene, etc).

I always buy detergent in a cardboard box? That's probably not great either...

That box is coated to make it water-resistant. Technically they can be separated and the paper half recycled, but almost no municipality does it.

I'm talking about the powder detergent. (Liquid detergent inherently wastes resources hauling water around. I already have water.) The inside of the box is just cardboard. The outside is printed with some sort of glossy image, but I don't see how it's qualitatively different than a cereal box...

The problem with glass is that it isn’t biodegradable. If it gets broken, it can cause a hazard for humans and wildlife. If it gets thrown away, it’s not going to break down. Glass is good for the ideal case, but not great for the other use cases. For milk and juice, it’s seems like thick paper might be a better option, since it’s biodegradable and recyclable.

Glass is literally molten sand. It will break down just like the rock breaks down. It's not toxic or hazardous, except when it's freshly shattered, but these super sharp edges weather relatively quickly, after which they aren't any sharper than natural found rock. This not to say that we should just don't care and throw away glass anywhere we want, but it's really not a huge deal, unless you hate seeing glass pebbles among normal rock pebbles.

> It's not toxic or hazardous, except when it's freshly shattered, but these super sharp edges weather relatively quickly, after which they aren't any sharper than natural found rock.

Glass actually takes a long time to lose its sharp edge unless it's dumped in a river or the ocean, which is in fact a great way to dispose of glass.

There really is no better way to dispose of garbage than dumping glass in the ocean... returning silica to its source in a way that doesn't look bad.

If you throw it into a water then somebody can step on it and hurt their feet.

Presumably they don't mean to scatter freshly shattered glass along swimming beaches. There's a lot of ocean where people aren't walking.

This all hinges on what you mean by “relatively fast”. If glass is being shattered and ends up being a hazard for years, this is much worse than a goopy old discarded plastic bottle, regardless of the perceived ugliness of the latter.

> this is much worse than a goopy old discarded plastic bottle

No, over time the plastic bottle will weather into cell-scale microplastic particles and play indefinite havoc with local wildlife. Glass will not.

Glass will cut my feet and shred my tires. The wildlife is largely unaffected. There'd still be trees, birds, animals, etc. You're blowing it out of proportion.

Glass is essentially sand. Sure it may be sharp when it just broke, but it gets dull pretty fast in nature.

Of all the things that got dumped onto this beach at Ft Bragg, glass was the least problematic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_Beach_(Fort_Bragg,_Calif...

additionally, isnt glass a semi natural occurring substance? Im pretty sure ive heard of lightning strikes in deserts/sand that created glass.

I never heard of that but TIL it's called Fulgurite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgurite

Glass is also created by volcanoes; we call that obsidian.

> dull pretty fast in nature

Especially when a critter chews on it accidentally, or it gets crushed under foot and some ends up in the foot.

It's the dulling process that sucks.

I once got a stick stuck in my foot. Maybe we should ban those.

Interesting, there is a community for sea glass..

https://seaglassassociation.org/

People often mention hygiene and complicated logistics as the reason disposable plastic packaging was adopted. I think as with lots of other examples through history, it is hard to know beforehand the negativities of an application of technology.

Hygiene? You can safely clean glassware with the most aggressive of chemicals, then maybe run it through an autoclave for extra safety.

Funny that people complain about glassware hygiene while chugging phtalate-infused beverages from plastic bottles.

Most "aggressive of chemicals" doesn´t sound too good...

I meant to point out that glass is inert in most conditions, be it chemicals, heat, UV radiation, etc.

Meanwhile, plastic containers are easily damaged by heat or UV light, and contaminate their contents.

Depends, are you the kind of person who considers "this product is not for sale in California" to be a feature or a warning?

Well... not THE most aggressive of chemicals, fluoroantimonic acid (H2F[SbF6]), the acid designed by top chemists to be the best acid that ever forcibly protonated a carbon atom into pentavalent carbonium.

That will dissolve the glass. (It can only be stored in PTFE.) It doesn't even have a pH, as it can't exist in aqueous solution, because it explosively destroys water.

Strong bases, like 50% or higher NaOH, also attack silicate glass.

You can clean glass with less aggressive chemical solutions that can still dissolve all organic materials and salts on the surface, without damaging the glass, and then remove those solutions completely, if the glass geometry permits. Or you can clean it well enough for commerce by inverting the bottle and blowing steam into it, something that would alter the geometry of a polyethylene bottle.

But a glassblowing robot can easily make a completely new bottle, that isn't going to have any unknown contaminants in it. Recycling glass doesn't save enough money to make it good business.

Of course you can, but there is a history:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/penny-lick-ice-cream

You realize that we reuse cutlery, glassware and dishware each time we eat in a restaurant other than KFC, right?

Another example would be beer bottles and marmalade/peanut butter/pickles jars.

Also, hard to take these concerns seriously when glass/plastic bottle deposit swaps are common in, say, Latin/South America.

How often are people getting sick drinking caguamas/garrafones?

The reality seems obvious: single-use plastic is cheapest and cheapest always wins.

We used to do this in the US. Then the throwaway generation happened.

There are still pockets where such reuse happens. My local growler house, and some of my local dairies, for example. I wish more business supported reuse of containers, though.

As a counterpoint: I live in Germany where we have such a system in place. When I went to the US for a few months not having such a system in place actually felt liberating. Suddenly I didn't have to worry about storing bottles, how to get them back to the store, etc. I just threw them into the recycling bin.

This might not be a problem for families or people that actually plan their grocery shopping and go there by car to buy for a whole week. But for me as someone who just stops at the store every day on the way home to get whatever I need it's really hard to bring empty bottles back to the store (I won't carry around empty bottles all day).

The argument that you’ll typically hear from business/engineering folks is that the carbon footprint of the glass bottle is too high because of the cost of manufacture, transport and washing.

The same argument was made in favor of styrofoam cups. I’m a skeptic.

Plastic is cheaper and doesn’t shatter. Some states in the US still have the refund thing for bottles. I’ve seen a vending machine in NYC for bottle refunds and one in Munich, Germany.

When I was in Central America they wouldn’t let you leave the store with the bottle. They would provide a plastic bag where you could sip the coke out with a straw.

To be clear: the bottle redemption machines in New York crush bottles, they don't save them for reuse

Wow I did not know that. It’s likely being thrown in a land fill. The garbage companies around me stopped collecting bottles years ago.

Do they do it to keep trash off the streets?

If NYC was into keeping the trash off the streets, they'd rather invest in better garbage collection methods than their current one, which is to have people just leave trash bags right there on the sidewalk, leaking all kinds of disgusting fluids all over the place. Really, Manhattan is such a disgusting, dirty, smelly place full of trash, that a few additional glass bottles here and there won't make too much of a difference.

The New York stuff goes to a place near Rochester, IIRC, and is back on the shelf as a bottle in a few weeks. Less for cans.

Germany is interesting - they have a nationwide bottle return system. Every supermarket over a certain size is required to have a bottle return system in place, and compensate you accordingly. It's called the "pfand" (deposit) system.

It's a way to make some money for poorer people too - collecting the bottles from the bins and public areas of the city can be quite lucrative. One plastic bottle gives you 25 cents, one beer bottle 8-15 cents.

Because it's cheaper to create new plastic, is the simple and unfortunate answer.

A lot of people have commented about plastic just being cheaper, etc., but the core aspect is that glass is simply very heavy for the volume contained, and requires greater care when handling at all stages of the use process. Shipping all that extra weight has real carbon consequences as well.

I'm ~45 years old. When I was a child this was the case. As a side note Milk came in plastic bags even then. But all carbonated beverages came in multiple sized glass bottles. In the Mid-80's (IIRC) there was an attempt to sell Coke-a-Cola in 2L size bottles but the glass couldn't handle the pressures and were apt to explode easily.

2L plastic bottles don't have this limitation.

We could even do reusable plastic bottles. I saw it a lot in Chile. They'd have a deposit on 3-liter coke bottles with a thick plastic. You'd exchange the old bottle when you bought a new one to avoid the deposit. Then they'd take those, clean them, and refill them. Often the bottom would even be a bit banged up from multiple uses.

Yes, also in Germany they use reusable plastic bottles. But the companies in other states argue that it is hard to introduce the system. It would definitely be easier to use just glass bottles.

I'd like to see reusable silicone packaging. Bonus points if the containers are standardised like shipping containers and fit together in a way that maximises internal volume, like the cells of a honeycomb. Who wouldn't like a container that is hydrophobic, making it easy to get every last bit of yoghurt out.

The most legitimate challenge is branding. Each company wants their own style bottle, maybe with a certain color to protect it from light, or maybe just with a certain visual appeal. If you have a universal bottle, they can be collected & reused anywhere. Pretty simple. But if the ten thousand different drink companies each have to collect, sort, & ship their bottles back to their processing plants that suddenly becomes a massive problem.

This could be standardised by the government if there is political will. Standard beer bottle, wine bottle, liqueur bottle etc. Non-standard bottle don't need to be banned, but surtaxed.

My guess is the cost in transport/logistics to reuse, cleaning and other potential liabilities outweigh the cost of simply manufacturing lots and lots of very cheap plastic bottles. Glass is heavy and dangerous. Plastic is incredibly cheap and lightweight.

This is based on nothing other than gut intuition and someone will probably come along and correct me.

In Ontario, you pay a small deposit ($0.10) for each glass bottle of beer. You can bring the bottles back to the store and get refunded the deposit.

This does happen at a small scale in the US. I usually buy milk in glass bottles that when returned are washed and reused.

We do this in a few states. Actually I grew up in one of them and just assumed it was nation wide.

They're heavier.

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