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Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

I’m not against these ideas but you do have to zoom out a bit to fully realize the impact of each alternative. It’s not as simple as replacing a “bad” one with a “good” one, because there are side effects.

(I haven’t added up the total impacts of every option either; this is just something to consider.)

For example, glass is much heavier than the plastic used for bottles. If you have trucks/etc. hauling millions of bottles around the world, it will take more energy to move glass bottles. Glass is also fragile so it’s possible there is more shipping material or more random losses affecting cost. So then the problem is not just how to replace plastic bottles with glass but how to offset the added environmental cost of transporting glass.

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All the cost/energy benefits listed are exactly the type of short term business arguments that enabled companies like Coca-Cola to transition from glass bootles to producing 110 _billion_ PET bootles, every, single, year. [0]

There are a number of long-term costs not captured in these business decisions:

- The energy cost of recycling a PET bottle is much greater than producing a brand new one from crude oil. This creates the wrong kind of incentives for recycling

- Plastic degrades everytime it is recycled. Google plastic "downcycling". In an ideal circular economy old plastics would still have to be replaced with "new" crude oil plastic with additional energy and emissions costs.

- The cost of plastic collection and _sorting_ (which manufacturers aren't paying for)

- The environmental and disposal costs of unrecycled plastic, a PET bottle will take at least 450 years to fully decompose. [1]

- The Health costs of the calamity of micro-plastics contaminating our food supply and ground water. Simply google "plastic endocrine disruptors".

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/02/coca-col...

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/plast...

> Simply google "plastic endocrine disruptors"

I did, and found that the 1996 paper that helped launch the movement against endocrine disruptors, was retracted in 2001 because the data was made up.

https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-02-0...

(I'm not making any claim here about whether endocrine disruptors in our environment are a problem or not. Maybe they are. But I don't like to be told "just Google X" because that can be used to support any nonsense nowadays. Just give me a good reference and I'll try to figure out whether it's credible.)

Fair point, I assumed this to be a matter-of-fact but I add more info below.

Evidence on the health effects of Bisphenol and Pthalates (commonly used chemicals in plastics):

- Influence in hormone dependent types of cancer https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31471387/

- Influence in Cardiovascular disease https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32438096/

- Influence in Female and male fertility https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31238688/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32046352/

- Cofactor in Diabetes: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31286379/

I think I owe you an apology for my snarky comment. I shouldn't start fact checking before my first coffee in the morning...

I’m with you with your conclusions but not only you are not responding to OPs point about the complexity of cost calculations, you are adding further data that is irrelevant. “This is what Coca-Cola said” is not a valid rebuttal.

If you really want to recycle you can. In Switzerland 80% of PET bottle are collected and recycled (without deposit). This is paid by manufacturers and distributors who have to collect and pay for the recycling. Current bottles are composed of 50% of recycled PET, and some manufacturer are starting to introduce 100% bottle. Of course, to reach that result you need laws, you cannot expect the free market to do it.

Do you have a source to backup that statement? It is true that there are separate containers for PET in CH, problem the way I see it, is that people simply do not know which bottles are PET and throw in there all kinds of plastic. Sometimes, when I throw mine, I take 5 and watch what the others are throwing, essentially, if the bottle has this 3 arrows "recycle" sign, it goes in the PET basket, simple as that.

Here is an article in English: https://lenews.ch/2020/01/14/swiss-get-more-pet-recycling-po...

> hauling millions of bottles around the world

If it's a 1:1 transition from plastic bottle to glass bottle, it would be 35 billion bottles annually, in the US alone.

It wouldn't be. Forcing the producers to pay for their externalities will also make some products like bottled water cost-prohibitive to sell in glass bottles and reduce demand or increase packaging sizes to more is bought in reusable plastic carboys, etc. "Reduce" is more important than reuse or recycle and while there is an obvious need for cheap bottled water, probably at least 80% of plastic disposable water bottles do not need to be sold in that way.

But how much other economic activity are you limiting and what other products are affected? For example, what about plastic for prototyping and engineering use? Are you going to force products to use higher cost and higher impact materials like brass and aluminum?

The issue is I can't see any of these restrictions accurately reflecting cost. If they could these things would not be a concern.

Any of these suggestions that apply only within a national market are also ineffective, as by their very nature they are going to reduce economic activity in that nation... which will be picked up by someone else who doesn't care. The laws need to take this into account.

> Are you going to force products to use higher cost and higher impact materials like brass and aluminum?

The post above you didn't suggest using higher impact materials like brass and aluminum, they suggested making manufacturers pay for externalities which would be the case for plastics or metals.

Nothing happens in a vacuum. You could very easily end up incentivizing worse behavior by misjudging what the externalities actually are and their impact.

Do you remember how telephone fraud with blue boxes was prosecuted? The stolen time was judged at full sale value of the minutes. But this doesn't make any sense, as if the call could not be placed for free it would not have happened, and if no one else was in line to place a call there was not lost revenue.

It seems like people are trying to do this with e.g. unrecycled plastics. Recycling is expensive likely because it is not economically productive, not because people are freeloading. The bar for showing otherwise should be very high.

> For example, glass is much heavier than the plastic used for bottles. If you have trucks/etc. hauling millions of bottles around the world, it will take more energy to move glass bottles.

This is true, but it (mostly) not an externalized cost. By forcing environmental costs to be internalized by industry, the market should guide industry away from damaging the environment. Of course that would require honest, complete, and well enforced regulation.

Where I live the local government told us to stop putting glass in our recycling bin and to throw it out instead. The reason I’ve heard is that the glass is breaking and making it harder to recycle it or the things it contaminates.

This is unfortunate because I don’t think most people are taking their glass to the supermarket to be recycled and instead a highly recyclable good is ending up in a plastic garbage bag at the landfill.

Parts of lower mainland BC (Canada) are the same. For example, I can recycle glass in Vancouver, but Surrey stopped accepting it years ago because they changed recycling companies and the new one considers it a safety hazard for their works. Conversely, Surrey will recycle plastic bags, but in Vancouver you have to drop them off at the grocery store (only a few stores do this).

> hauling millions of bottles around the world

I haven't used a bottle of any sort for water for at least ten years. Not everyone has access to safe water, but billions do and billions more would if by not thinking we can fall back on bottles and therefore maintained cleaner water supplies.

We don't need alternatives for many things. Paper or plastic? Neither. I've shopped with the same bag since the 90s. Most beverages are marketing gimmicks we'd be happier, safer, and less polluting without -- same with most packaged food, children's toys, fast fashion, and so on.

Our sense of entitlement and disconnect with healthy living, nature, and how we used to live is killing us.

The folks at Tap (https://findtap.com/) are trying to make it easier to refill a water bottle while your out and about or traveling. It doesn’t solve the problem globally, but it’s great to see companies trying to reduce plastic waste and make it easy and free/cheap to access clean water.

Well, is it free or is it cheap?

The solution is called a water fountain and they should all be free.

In the end someone has to pay for it. Water fountains need maintenance and cleaning. I’ve seen quite a few public fountains I’d never drink from. Tap is interesting because it correctly aligns consumer incentives and maintenance costs.

Transport energy cost is a challenge. Luckily, that whole sector is moving towards using clean energy. So, it matters less as long as we clean that part of our economy up. Also, it perhaps incentivizes manufacturers to recycle and produce closer to consumers. That's the beauty of making this the manufacturers problem: they get to be creative finding solutions to these problems.

Germany already has deposits on things like soda cans, plastic bottles, and beer bottles. It works and isn't crippling the economy. Also the likes of Coca Cola are operating in Germany and turning a profit despite this. They face similar rules elsewhere in Europe. This is already part of their business today. A lot of the plastic bottles are ending up being recycled. Half the success is simply collecting them separately from normal waste so you get all the PET plastics sorted together. That makes that easier. Some of the bottles are actually cleaned and reused.

Simply making recycling a concern for the manufacturer is the key to getting businesses to compete on being more sustainable because it becomes their problem to solve. Single use plastics only make sense when you get to dump them for "free" without regard for cleaning up the mess.

IMHO the main challenges with plastics long term are ensuring the stuff either breaks down when dumped or does not end up in land fills and our oceans. Secondly, we are using oil for producing plastics and could long term be switching to synthesized carbohydrates produced using clean energy. This requires a lot of R&D to happen to scale this and do it more efficiently of course. But it would change things a lot. We'll need stupendous amounts of cheap energy for this. That's actually a good thing when the cheapest form of energy we make is increasingly from renewables. So, the more demand we have on that the faster the demise of dirty energy.

Is there any good reason we can't start putting damn near every liquid into huge aluminium (or tin?) cans?

It uses alot of power to smelt originally but it recycles forever with no degradation. Aluminium at least.

It's interesting that, at least in the UK, the beer industry is fine with glass bottles and metal cans.

Why is soda so special that it deserves special treatment?

The beer industry would love to use plastic bottles. But beer goes stale in plastic. Plastic is not good at keeping the oxygen out and the alcohol in. There are bottles with multiple layers in different types of plastic that work reasonably well, but they are more expensive than standard PET bottles, much harder to recycle than PET, and still not as good for storing beer as glass is.

> hauling millions of bottles around the world

How much of those bottles are single-use bottles for water? We can cut that portion entirely. 100%.

Either install filters (ideal) or use reusable 5-gal plastic bottles and water dispensers.

I'm not sure the choice is between shipping glass or plastic bottles long distances, but rather having the bottling plants closer or further from the consumption

Why keep shipping bottles around? Leave them where they are. Ship the liquid in tanker trucks and fill the bottles at the destination.

That is what happens.

The scale is just so immense.

Coca Cola, for instance, is produced and bottled in at least 68 separate plants in the US alone.

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