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Comment by bcrosby95 | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the attractiveness of plastic for stuff when perfectly good alternatives exist. People have been using glass for hundreds of years and I'm not aware of any studies showing it's harmful.

We used glass bottles for milk when our kids were young. The only people to ever break them was us: around 3 total during the course of raising 3 kids.

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Because perfectly good alternatives don’t exist? i.e. glass is far more expensive to produce and ship, it’s heavy and brittle etc.

Glasses are great, and have some wonderful properties, but so do the the various plastics–they’re responsible for raising living standards for millions of people.

Glass is heavy and shatters on impact into many sharp pieces that can cut you. Plastic bounces.

It's just convenient not to have to wash the cup.

At work I have a glass mug for coffee, but I still use paper cups for water. If I replace it with glass it means I will now have 2 things to wash.

That's some interesting calculus there. You don't want to wash 2 cups for a total time investment of 60 seconds, so you choose to generate extraordinary waste to save 30 seconds, damage the environment and your health. Makes complete sense to me.

Not to mention if you're using the cup for only water and you're the only user then you can easily get away with washing it once a week or less. Washing a water glass after every usage is extraordinarily wasteful.

My solution saves all 60 seconds. I just use my coffee cup for water and never wash it. I wish I was joking.

You can use your coffee cup for coffee and hardly wash it.

Would the coffee mug, on a scale of not-very-hard-things-to rinse, not be far harder on that not-very-hard-scale to rinse than a mug used for water?

You don't need to wash a coffee mug because coffee is magic.

> It's just convenient not to have to wash the cup.

What about the dish washer? Isn’t that convenient? If it is environmentally friendly or not that’s another question.

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