Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

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>We should go back to glass bottles, whenever possible.

There are very good, very practical reasons we moved from glass (and metal and other materials) containers to plastic. Unless those factors are sufficiently addressed, plastic is here to stay.

For those who haven't been keeping track or are just too damn young to know history, those factors include:

* Weight. Glass and metal, and also other materials like ceramic and wooden containers, are heavy compared to plastic. This additional weight means it takes more energy to transport, meaning more costs in fuel and labor.

* Fragility. This namely applies to glass; glass containers are fragile and they are very dangerous to handle if and when they break. Plastic containers are much more durable, and even if they break they are seldom as dangerous as broken glass. More broken containers also mean more goods lost to spillage, which in turn means additional cost to re-manufacture and re-ship.

* Durability. Going along with the above, plastics are equal to metal containers in keeping contents and the outside world separated. This is incredibly important for ensuring food safety.

* Contaminants. This applies primarily to metal containers, but also paper and sometimes ceramic. Metals leach into foods, this is mostly prevented with special coatings but it's not perfect and the coatings themselves are also contaminants that will eventually leach. Likewise paper containers which have coatings applied so liquids don't seep through, and sometimes ceramic containers to prevent leaching. We know these contaminants are bad, unlike microplastics where we still aren't conclusively sure.

* Cost. Plastic is cheap compared to basically every other material we can make containers out of. This is a great boon to the consumer who ultimately ends up paying the most markup.

I agree with every point here, and they all make a lot of sense... yet most alcoholic beverages are shipped to the consumer in glass bottles, including even the cheapest beers.

I have seen some drinks shipped in plastic, so it is possible to do, I wonder if glass packaging is a 'premium' thing. Though, if they can do it for cheap beer, then I'm sure they can do it for non-alcoholic drinks on scale.

I've seen and had alcohol in plastic. They generally seem to do fine.

But damn did it feel cheap in a bad way. Being cheap is obviously one of the reasons we use plastic containers, but the feeling associated with plastic alcohol is just plain irrationally bad.

a 500 ml Al can weights 13 grams. life knows if we can skim down its weight if we don't have self openers, the price if we develop a better recycling system etc.

if plastics have impact on human health, how many $ we can save for using re-usable glass and metal?

Aluminum cans are lined in plastic.

I think it's about steel cans?

It's about reducing costs for the producers and supermarkets, ignoring externalities. That is, tons of plastic that doesn't get recycled and goes to the landfill. Now the issue seems worse as another important externality are adverse effects to human health.

I can't believe costs of switching to glass or ceramic are that high. I've bought tons of inexpensive dairy and desserts that came packaged using those materials. But since most customers don't care, they tend to use plastic.

Some EU supermarkets used to have a circular glass system where products were brought in bulk, and only canned in glass inside the shop, sometimes by the customer. Bottles were then returned after use, washed locally and reused many times. This looked fairly efficient.

Restaurants and bars still have the same system here for e.g. Coca-Cola drinks, which come inside a glass bottle that has been reused several times. I'm not sure plastic is more efficient than reusing a glass bottle. Lots of yogurts are packaged in glass containers, and price seems average. I have also heard that plastic is rarely recycled, so it also sounds unsustainable from that perspective.

> cost

Oh yes, I love paying a couple cents less per drink to have micro plastics in me

And - of course - you're probably not even paying a couple of cents less. Those couple of cents are extra profit for everyone further up the 'value chain'.

And when your girlfriend finds out you have microplastics in your emissions, she'll say "yay, thank you for putting microplastics in me."

And yet you would get, on average, 0 microplastics from drinking out of plastic bottles since those are brand new bottles which have not been subject to UV degradation of any kind. They're also entering via the GI tract, which doesn't have a particularly high rate of foreign matter exchange with the blood stream.

Meanwhile you'll walk outside sipping your glass bottle and take a deep breath of tire dust from nearby cars, which is actually the primary route of exposure for microplastics to enter the body since the lungs do exchange particles with the blood stream (notably, you will also find silicates, soot and basically every other type of thing all throughout the body via lung exchange as a mechanism).

in many ways it seems likely that this response was generated by chat gpt , I apologise if this was not the case

Apologies accepted.

What's the toxicity of microglass particulates?

AFAIK, glass is super stable. It won't shed anything significant unless you grind it, at least according to the literature.

Silica is one of the most common substances on earth — the crust is more than half silica by mass. Pretty much all life can, by necessity, tolerate a good deal of silica exposure. You don't really want to breathe a lot of fine silica dust (or, frankly, any size of glass bits), but actively grinding it into dust that gets airborne is just about the only way it'll cause problems, other than cutting yourself.

So glassware is safer than plastics? I'm not going to get bits of glass in my brain just from drinking soda out of bottles?

Yes, glassware is vastly more stable than plastics. Ever microwave something in a plastic bowl and it comes out smelling kinda plasticky? That smell means it’s degraded and venting volatile compounds that are chemically reacting with your olfactory neurons.

Smelling something doesn’t automatically make something dangerous, obviously. It does mean the molecules that were previously part of your plastic soup bowl are now knocking around in the open air.

Glass doesn’t do that at common temperatures. It’s basically inert.

You mean sand?

I was too clever by half. Dalewyn omitted safety from their criteria comparing glass to plastic.

>glass containers are fragile and they are very dangerous to handle if and when they break. Plastic containers are much more durable, and even if they break they are seldom as dangerous as broken glass.

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