And they can BPA-free you all they want, but they just keep shifting to newer, less tested substances that don't have a bad reputation yet.
If you want to buy water when you're out and about and want it in a glass bottle, your only choices are the "premium" brands that cost an arm and a leg.
And, more generally, it's pretty darn hard to avoid plastics when buying food. When I was a kid, when my parents bought meat from the butcher, it would be wrapped in actual paper, or close enough that it would become unusable once home, and they had to move the meat to solid containers. Nowadays, that "paper" seems to be able to withstand whatever you throw at it. Packaged meats and cheeses always come wrapped in some kind of plastic. The only food I still see in glass containers are "canned" vegetables.
I'd say it's silicone impregnated paper like parchment paper or probably is parchment paper which is paper coated with silicone.
way worse than PLA.
http://igui-ecologia.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/202...
It's expensive, it's brittle, it's heavy, it takes up a lot of space.
Except we didn't; wine and spirits come almost exclusively in glass bottles, beer is frequently in glass (although cans are also used), almost every store will have some sodas and bottled water in glass, most people at home and restaurants use glasses made from, well, glass, etc.
If you pour it out in a glass it makes no difference.
Boxed wine exists, and is a bit under half the market (by volume). Wine in glasses is still the majority of sales. Beer/cider/larger is sold in cans or bottles, with cans being about 2/3rd by volume.
And contrary to sibling comment, glass containers don't leach heavy metals (or anything else) into food.
Glass requires massively more energy to manufacture, even using 100% recycled glass. Glass is heavy, so it's more expensive to transport. Collecting and washing bottles for re-use consumes a substantial amount of energy, which greatly increases the number of trips required to break even on the higher manufacturing impacts. The lifespan of a re-usable glass bottle is relatively very short, because glass is fragile. Glass compares poorly to HDPE when we factor in a realistic lifespan for glass and a realistic recycling rate for HDPE.
Minimising the transport costs is part of the design of the reuse process. Milk floats are a great example of this. Milk delivered to the door by an electrical vehicle daily and empties collected by the same vehicle, washed and refilled. This was the standard way to get milk (and often juice, eggs, etc) in my childhood but nowadays people throw a plastic bottle into a generic recycling stream every time and I highly doubt it's an improvement.
Online grocery shopping reduces fuel usage and pollution for getting goods to homes by consolidating many deliveries in one vehicle round. It would be great to see this being used (again) as a way of improving packaging efficiency too, one way or another.
Driving heavy glass back and forth from the bottling plant burns a lot of diesel unnecessarily.
Drink a soda from a can and then the same kind from a glass? Night and day. Try experimenting with spoons to eat: wooden, plastic, different metals. You really notice that, or you should: the spoon goes right on your tongue to introduce the food.
And even if below noticing levels I think plastic molecules have been detected in such beverages, but uncertain here.
But certainly also kind of what you are used to, always surprising for some folks to learn that for others chlorine water is associated with freshness, while clean water is a bit foul.
Most common soda-lime glass has negligible amounts of undesirable impurities, while borosilicate glass, like I use for my food and drinks, is even more pure and it contains almost nothing besides oxides of silicon, boron, sodium and aluminum, and it is inert in contact with food.
In short, only the enamelled decorations may contain heavy metals, which leech in the environment after use. This is a serious problem, but not with glass as such.
So yeah, you can remove the plastic lining from paper, but that severely decreases our quality of life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waxed_paper
We went to the taco stand which was known as the "drive-by shooting" place, and got carne asada quesadillas or something, and she told me to insist that they not use any packaging on them, but just put them in our hands. We "single-handedly" saved the planet that night!
The problem is that it is currently impossible to know whether the PE or PP used in some plastic vessel is pure or it contains significant quantities of various fillers that have been added for reducing the cost of the material or the cost of various processing steps through which it has passed.
The PE or PP vessels that are translucent and not colored are more likely to contain less undesirable fillers than the vessels that are opaque and/or colored.
What is needed is to have stricter laws about food-contact materials, where the manufacturer must disclose the exact chemical composition of such materials and they must not be able to claim that this is proprietary information that may be kept secret, like today.
Messy process, but once they dried, they actually functioned pretty well as a reusable wrap and cover. Stiff enough to hold their shape, self-adherent, it can be used like cling wrap or aluminum foil, and could be cleaned and reused dozens of times.
Not sure if it is a net positive or negative for the environment, but it's at least practical.
> I guess they could coat them in something else, like beeswax
Beeswax is a plastic, just not a petrochemical-derived plastic.
I thought answers to my comment would rather focus on the low melting point, making it hard to use for hot beverages (though 60°C is high enough for drinks).
You are right of course, but the article mentioned PLA, IIRC? Reading more on this topic, it seems that PLA is biodegradable, but only in industrial, high temperature composters?