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Comment by ryanwhitney | Hacker News Reader

I hated this brand when I first saw it. The epitome of marketing bullshit: make water look edgy/cool/etc.

But overall, the fact that it comes in aluminum cans does seem like a good thing in comparison to bottle water. No idea what the environmental (weight?) tradeoffs are compared to shipping plastic bottles though.

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Ball corporation, the largest manufacturer of aluminum cans, commissioned a study of the environmental impact of aluminum cans against cartons, PET, and glass:

https://www.ball.com/getattachment/85d9e3af-e3aa-4b93-a687-5...

and if you go to page 121, you can see figure 5-6 "Global Warming Potential [kg CO2 eq.] per gallon of fill volume, cradle-to-grave incl. transports, US, TRACI 2.1" which shows that for non-carbonated beverages the 16.9 oz clear PET bottle has the lowest total lice cycle impact, by a fairly large margin. The paragraph following the figure:

"The 16.9oz PET bottle for non-carbonated water has the lowest impact overall due to its extremely thin-wall design. The second place among non-carbonated drinks packaging is a close match between aluminum cans and beverage cartons, with very similar overall burdens. Glass bottles, by a large margin, come in last. Among options for carbonated drinks, aluminum performs strongest, followed by PET bottles and finally glass. The low mass and high recycled content of aluminum cans enable consistently low impacts of this packaging format. The lightweight nature of the PET bottles make them a highly efficient packaging format, where the majority of climate change impacts are coming from the fossil-based raw materials"

Learned this recently and found it surprising!

CO2 is only one measure of environmental impact. Pollution is a very big problem for disposable beverage containers, and the good thing about aluminum is that it is highly recyclable and also has a significant enough scrap value that it incentivizes collecting the waste instead of discharging it into the environment.

This is (unsurprisingly!) also in that source:

> Aluminum cans have relatively high MCI scores of ~0.7, which reflects the highest average recycled content (55% of can stock, 3% of end and tab stock) and end of life recycling rate (69%) of all beverage packaging materials.

very good point, I do think in general plastic packaging should be avoided as much as possible exactly for that reason.

The inner lining of aluminum cans is usually plastic, I believe.

In this case, Liquid Death makes it a point to have zero plastic: https://liquiddeath.com/pages/death-to-plastic

That page doesn’t actually claim they don’t use plastic in their cans though, just that plastic is bad.

The closest I could find to them officially saying this is in response to an Amazon question, https://www.amazon.com/ask/questions/Tx2DCFGHH4BKDVS/ref=ask...

> Nope. Our cans are BPA-free.

Their FAQ has a related question about how you may get some plastic packaging when you buy from Amazon, but that's not the bottles, that's outside of the boxes themselves: https://liquiddeath.com/pages/faq#:~:text=Unfortunately%2C%2....

BPA free doesn't mean all plastic though. So we'll have to wait for a YouTuber to helpfully try it out in video to show whether or not they do. But also, this doesn't have to be a purity test - even though I think they probably use plastic inside of their cans because they very studiously avoid saying they don't, less plastic is still less plastic. A very thin layer of liner vs enough plastic to be durable as a bottle is an improvement over the status quo.

Most/all plastic for food use is BPA free at this point. Looks like elaborate marketing. I think something like 95%+ of metal food containers are lined with plastic to prevent the metal from reacting/leeching into the food. Making some assumptions here but I suspect because the vast majority/all of the aluminum can supply chain is plastic lined that these are as well.

Yeah to be honest at this point I am leaning your way as well. I did not know this about aluminum cans generally until this thread!

I am not entirely sure that this invalidates the "better than plastic bottled water" claim, but good to know regardless! Suspicious!

I definitely don't think it invalidates that claim! Aluminum cans afaik are still better in that the amount of plastic used is significantly less and you can recycle the outer shell.

I did not see anywhere that the cans do not have a plastic liner...unless I skipped it in the video.

I will admit that I haven't specifically checked on the exact composition of their packaging, but "fuck plastic, we're all aluminum" is a marketing message I have heard from them many times. It's possible that they're making that up, but I would assume they'd get in trouble for lying so blatantly. Maybe that's naive of me.

I don't buy it for environmental reasons, so I've just taken them at their word.

Anyone got a can of liquid death and some drain cleaner who wants to prove this?

that also means you cannot store it after being opened. at least bottled water can be stored

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