Hacker News Reader

Comment by srj | Hacker News Reader

There needs to be regulation that standardizes on container materials and shapes, optimizing for recyclability and ability to sort. Then there needs to be a financial incentive to use packaging that offers the highest reclaimation rates. I'm imagining something like the CAFE standards, encouraging ever increasing rates.

I listened to a podcast with one of the former heads of the EPA and one of the challenges is that the petroleum industry actively favors non-reuse so they can keep selling more plastic.

Edit: Here's the podcast: https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/to-the-point/the-high-cost-o...

View on HN

Look up the Pfand system in Germany. Most domestic beer comes in one of two brown glass bottle shapes with brewery-specific labels. Any brown glass bottle of that shape can be turned into a few cents (I think it was 12.5) at essentially any grocery store's machine. Bottles are washed/reused up to 40-50 times before they even need to be melted down and recycled. Because of the reward there are people who roam around and pick up bottles every day, so a glass bottle in a park has a lifetime of about 1/2 day max. A few other drinks come in those bottles, e.g. Spezi. But coke? Nope. Plastic and aluminum. Imported beer? Nope.

The system in Germany isn't perfect, but it's pretty damn good.

The pfand system in Germany also works for Coke and pepsi...

Yes, you get even more money for the plastic and aluminum, but this is recyling only; they don't reuse the bottles because they are bottled out of country and don't use standard bottles.

If we were actually serious about saving the planet, we'd just pass laws that mandate companies have to use certain specified bottles, and give them no choice.

But of course, lobbying and profits are more important.

How do you improve the bottles? Do we create a national bottle innovation center that creates bottles?

Not a cola company problem, but black plastics can't be read by the optical sorters that recycling plants use to read the 3 or 4 or whatever number on them. So they end up in the landfill stream.

They should be banned overnight. But we can't be having that!

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/restaurants-coffee-pl...

Maybe upgrade the optical sorter?

It's not _that_ simple. Recycling doesn't care about shape, just material, and reusing has the problem of people putting random things in the bottle before sending it off - including toxic and/or corrosive materials, thus making reusing impossible.

Tons of countries throughout Latin America, Africa and Europe reuse large glass bottles for soda and beer and whatever else.

The bottles are thoroughly cleaned and sterilized between uses.

It is that simple. Make it a law, get on with it.

Not only does re-use take large amounts of water in the cleaning of containers, but glass is orders or magnitude more expensive to ship product in. You're shipping a ton of glass around when you could be using that weight to ship product. It drives up cost and increases fuel burn.

It is not that simple. Unfortunately.

> glass is orders or magnitude more expensive to ship product in

That sounds like nonsense. For a filled ~300ml container of soda, a glass bottle would be ~20% (ballpark) heavier than an aluminum can. Even if shipping costs increased by a similar proportion (actually less, but whatever) and we include the cost of cleaning bottles, it seems we would still end up ahead compared to the song-and-dance of recycling, which is incredibly resource intensive.

Not only weight, but due to the breakable nature of glass you also need more protective packaging, and you still get more breakage than plastic, which drives cost up even more due to lost product.

With plastic, throw some shrinkwrap on them and you're good to go.

I’m not concerned about price for non essential items like soft drinks. Having a functioning ecosystem is far more important than whether or not you have to pay an extra dollar for your coke.

Then refill plastic bottles, as is common in Germany.

Can’t you recycle the water?

The problem with this solution is that washing and sterilizing makes a heavy demand on the country’s own water sources, which may already be facing depletion. It works well in, say, Northern Europe which is very wet, but in Peru or India such a system is not so environmentally friendly. There, it may be better to use plastic containers that are recycled at a facility elsewhere.

Peru already re-uses glass bottles.. they were doing it in 2010 when I spent 2 months there.

It's shocking you'd propose single use plastic bottles to be recycled over glass bottles that can be re-used hundreds (thousands?) of times.

I'm sure they can capture and clean the water and re-use that too, it doesn't just have to go down the drain.

I just can't help feeling that with everything there are nine million reasons not to do something, so we end up doing nothing. Analysis Paralysis.

There used to be hard plastic, reusable bottles.

You do realise they wash new bottles as one of the final steps in making them?

I can't find figures comparing the water used in production vs reuse.

How much water is used to clean/sterilize a bottle? Compared to resources consumed making the container from scratch or attempting to crush/reprocess it?

FWIW India already has a robust bottle return and reuse system.

> Compared to resources consumed making the container from scratch or attempting to crush/reprocess it?

Empty containers can be loaded onto container ships, where they can be recycled elsewhere, and new containers delivered the same way. While that may still not be environmentally optimal on a world scale, at least it would consume no extra water in regions that are arid or facing groundwater depletion.

> FWIW India already has a robust bottle return and reuse system.

The soft-drink industry in India has already been castigated for depletion of groundwater, so again, washing and sterilizing all these bottles only compounds the damage.

I feel like we are stuck in a loop. Perhaps we need question whether or not it still makes sense to transport food and drink in small, individual containers. One solution might be to transport in bulk. You could take your own bottles to the supermarket that are whatever shape and material you desire and fill them up.

How do you preserve the carbonation of soft drinks, then?

In order for drinks to stay fizzy, the container has to be filled under pressure. Even if you offer customers some fancy machine that can fill their bottles under pressure, you still risk issues with customers bringing in old, flimsy containers that cannot withstand those pressures.

I'm not sure what the solution to that would be. Maybe sodastreams will become popular again.

Same kind of reusable bottle you'd buy kombucha in. Flip top, gasket seal.

Use glass bottles. We used reuse glass soda and beer bottles all the time, part of your charge when purchasing these products was a bottle deposit that would be refunded upon return.

Okay, great, you solved the reuse of material problem.

Now what about the difference in weight your solution creates? The added weight means more fuel consumed in transport, both from bottling to store and during recycling...

I'm not saying your solution isn't better btw, I didn't do the math; just reminding you that it might not be as straightforward as "just do x".

It's not just the petroleum industry - Coca-Cola has also lobbied pretty strongly against a deposit system: https://theintercept.com/2019/10/18/coca-cola-recycling-plas...

It's because it eats into their profits.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com