Drowning in plastic: Visualising the world’s addiction to plastic bottles | Hacker News Reader

Drowning in plastic: Visualising the world’s addiction to plastic bottles

graphics.reuters.com

29 points80mph9 comments

Will anything change? Take bottled water as just one example - mostly sold in plastic bottles. Just look at this chart of bottled water consumption in Europe from 2017. Good luck getting people to change their consumption habits:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/455422/bottled-water-con...

You have to hand it to the bottled water companies. They pulled off what must be one of the biggest cons in the world. First world countries with potable tap water buying it in bottles with inflated prices because of reasons.

I'm sure it can be done - Sweden has 1/18th the consumption of Italy. So just copy Sweden. The biggest obstacle is probably the plastics and bottled water companies, who make billions on keeping consumer habits (and laws!) as they are: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/03/03/a...

Is this based on the volume of bottles, intact?

The amount of plastic is a small percentage of that volume - that 10-year mountain might become a single office building of solid plastic.

And I believe PET is one of the more recyclable plastics. Certainly, in less developed nations, it's collected, for profit.

In fact this is the real problem with plastic - whether it is collected properrly, or left to wash out into the oceans.

If it's collected, even if it goes to landfill (we're not running out of land to fill, and I believe landfills will become the mines of the future), it can be very efficient in terms of 'usefulness vs environmental impact'. Perhaps much better than many alternatives (eg cotton grocery bags). If it's left to drift, it can be quite a problem.

IE We should be looking much more closely at material handling and life-cycle, rather than focusing exclusively on materials themselves.

> The amount of plastic is a small percentage of that volume - that 10-year mountain might become a single office building of solid plastic.

A typical pedantic HN's comment. The point of the infographic is to draw attention to the growing plastic pollution crisis. In 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans [0]. Plastic is falling out of the sky in Arctic [1]. Does it really matter if you count intact bottles or pure plastic volume?

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/01/2...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49295051

Not at all

My point is that plastic COLLECTION is the issue, not the amount produced.

And wildly hyping the actual amount of plastic with dis-information-graphics does not help the cause.

When did we start drinking so much bottled water?

Must have been about 25-30 years ago I remember noticing it and wondering why would I want to pay for water, it has always been free.

Hint: Drinking bottled water was a subtle "they're gay" punchline in the film Heathers (1988).

https://moviechat.org/tt0097493/Heathers/58c74f926b51e905f67...

Google's Ngram viewer shows a consistant uptick of print mentions since 1985:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=bottled+water&...

And sales volume since 1996:

https://douglashicton.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/bottlegrap...

For myself, until the mid-1990s, it simply wasn't a thing. I would occasionally buy a bottle on road trips in the 1990s (I now carry a reusable drink bottle, those are going on ten years' use for me).

If you view conference videos online, you'll note that pitchers and glasses in earlier videos were replaced by plastic bottles later. Those are now starting to disappear in some cases, though tetra-pack water also sometimes appears. An interesting sort of incidental meta-commentary on late capitalism.

I just simply do not get this at all. Why do people (a) pay for water which (at least in the US, with some exceptions) even unfiltered has quality parity with bottled water, and (b) not feel empathy for the damage they are causing with the single-use container? It sickens me every time I see people by cases of this stuff. AFAIAC, there should be at least a large tax or deposit charged for these bottles.

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