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Comment by DoingIsLearning | Hacker News Reader

How is this not moving more responsability and work onto consumers rather than tackling the problem at the root.

Coca-cola had a 2.7B EBTDA last quarter. Marketing needs to stop blowing smoke up people's rears.

If they care about the environment, they can just use glass! Install mega watts of renewables to provide the power for glass recycling. Zero plastic in the environment.

Companies need to stop externalizing their costs into environmental problems and telling people it's their problem for buying it.

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It's actually a consumer choice thing. Poor countries tend to sell Coke in glass bottles because it's cheaper to run a bottle deposit program and refill them than to sell plastic that just gets thrown away. But consumers don't want glass, it breaks and it's heavy; they want disposable plastic. In fact, for decades consumers have actually bought coke from stores in plastic bags with straws, and collect the bottle deposit at purchase time. (I grew up drinking coke from plastic bags)

People need to start taking responsibility for their complicity in the world's problems, rather than blaming everyone but themselves and demanding someone else fix all their problems and pay for it too.

Plastic bags make sense when people are carrying all their groceries on foot from the store to their homes. If the same people had to put their groceries in a car to be jostled about, I bet they wouldn't like their liquids in bags that can leak and leave a mess in their expensive cars.

I think a lot of people like glass, but I haven't seen a recycler want it in a long time. So is it more responsible to buy glass that you know is going in the trash, or plastic that might be recycled? It's not obvious.

> but I haven't seen a recycler want it

Perhaps that is a US problem, in Europe glass recycling is fairly Universal at all recycling centres and most neighbourhood streets have below ground waste containers for glass.

At least in my reality the issue is that Retailers have virtually eliminated glass alternatives from supermarket shelves. Other than beer/wine and some 1.5L juice bottles, pretty much everything else is plastic, even when the same product is also manufactured in glass, it simply does not exist in supermarket shelves.

You have to go to very large distribution centres to actual find glass alternatives for everyday products. So to me turning this into a consumer issue is naive.

Glass beverage bottles are unpopular in the US too, but at least in places I've lived the recyclers don't want glass anymore. I think the only commercial glass recycling that is energy-efficient (that is, competitive with using plastic) is bottle washing. If you buy beer, wine, or anything else in glass here, which is not exactly rare, you usually have to just throw the bottles away.

I would be interested to know if your country subsidizes the glass recycling or if it is legally mandated. I'm also curious about relevant regulations in the US too. It might be the case that we require a level of sterilization for bottles that is more strict than other countries, that makes it uneconomical to recycle. There are so many possible factors. Recycling is a very low-profit industry and it is often operated at a loss. In some cases the recyclers throw away almost everything, keeping only certain easily separable stuff like aluminum cans and clean cardboard.

As far as I understand, if you return glass into a recycling centre or to waste management anywhere here it will always be for cullet glass.

Bottle washing here only happens if you return the bottles at a supermarket or other retailers, who then return it (unbroken) to the original manufacturer.

I haven't tried turning it in at a recycling center. That seems more likely to work. I was talking about roadside and public recycling bins, which don't seem to welcome glass anymore.

Capitalist enterprises look for the cheapest option, unless the consumer demands otherwise. Bottles are heavy and fragile, which means increased transportation costs and losses. If consumers demanded glass, they'd charge us a premium and happily provide glass, and make a profit off our demand.

Organic food is a perfect example. They incur more losses and operations are more expensive, but they charge a premium and profit from our demand. In other cases they remove harms when it threatens their profits. Antibiotics, rBST, etc in milk are scary, so milk producers remove them and advertise they're now less bad for us, so we buy that milk more.

But in order for those cases to happen, consumers had to demand the product change. And the only reason consumers demanded it was fear. They were afraid they were being poisoned, so they demanded change; producers feared for their profits, and made changes.

Sadly, consumers don't give a shit about the environment. If they did they would have demanded an end to disposable plastics decades ago, when it was widely known the kinds of pollution the packaging was causing. We didn't care then, we don't care now. Not enough to act, anyway.

But luckily, and kind of amazingly, "Government" is doing what it's supposed to do. Very slowly, laws are being passed at local and state level to set deadlines to curtail or eliminate disposable products. Sometimes the laws have no teeth, but it's a step in the right direction (even if it does take decades to take effect). But lobbyists will fight this and try to convince consumers the change is bad, so the companies don't have to spend money to change.

If consumers want the change to happen soon, they must demand it themselves. They do it when they're afraid just fine; waiting for them to be afraid enough may be too late.

I don't share your anti-capitalist takes. You act as if everyone always knew this was a serious problem, and to some extent I think you're overstating the problem. Plastic is somewhat bad for us and the environment but it is also hugely beneficial and cost-effective. The solution to our ills is most likely to come in the form of a biodegradable polymer rather than glass bottles and metal cans.

>If consumers demanded glass, they'd charge us a premium and happily provide glass, and make a profit off our demand.

That is exactly what happens now. You can get soda and beer in glass but it costs more. Bottled wine costs more than similar boxed wine. I'm sure there is a small difference with many other products too.

>Sadly, consumers don't give a shit about the environment. If they did they would have demanded an end to disposable plastics decades ago, when it was widely known the kinds of pollution the packaging was causing. We didn't care then, we don't care now. Not enough to act, anyway.

They do care but plastic has been recycled for decades now. Perhaps it is not the most recyclable material but lots of consumers are on board with some kind of recycling system, and reuse plastic stuff in their own lives outside of commercial recycling.

>Very slowly, laws are being passed at local and state level to set deadlines to curtail or eliminate disposable products.

On this subject, paper straws are the worst and have been proven to exude toxic chemicals. To add insult to injury, you have to store them in plastic wrappers to be sure they stay dry.

Reducing the amount of plastic in use is generally a low priority for government. It's a slow problem with many solutions that don't involve banning things.

>They do it when they're afraid just fine; waiting for them to be afraid enough may be too late.

There's not an obvious "too late" for plastic. It's a slow problem. Even the seemingly huge amount of plastic out there can be picked up and handled in various ways. The bigger issue is the microplastics that are difficult to collect. The idea that you can drive up to buy a $7 drink in a plastic cup with a plastic lid, and be refused a straw that actually works, really pisses people off. There are much more important forms of pollution that could be addressed, like the artificial chemicals and pesticides in our food.

Another example of a bad policy is the ban on plastic bags. While this might make sense sometimes, every time someone forgets their bags or even runs out of bags unexpectedly during checkout, they end up buying bags anyway. The bags for sale are often restricted to the heavy reusable kind, which are made as cheap as possible for the occasion and are not attractive or durable enough to be saved indefinitely. These bags have been found to generate more waste in some cases than letting people do what they think is right. A lot of people use the ordinary thin plastic bags around the house until they fall apart anyway, and some stores collect them for recycling as well.

>they can just use glass

Does anyone even recycle glass anymore? I know it used to be a thing but I think fresh plastic bottles probably cost less than even the collection and sorting costs for glass. I haven't seen any recycler ask for glass in ages.

>Companies need to stop externalizing their costs into environmental problems and telling people it's their problem for buying it.

They are just giving people what they want at a price they can pay. If you really want to minimize waste, the way to go is probably for people to make their own soda at home using flavor extracts. It's easy and probably less polluting to do this than anything else. But when you're not at home, you have to have drinks ready-made.

My local transfer station has a large glass deposit the same size as its plastic one.

In Quebec you bring your glass bottles back for their deposit and at least for the beer bottles they are cleaned and reused many times.

I'm going to have to do more research. I can just say, I haven't seen glass welcome in recycle bins in a long time. It makes me wonder what changed, which types of recycling are subsidized, etc.

Many bottles in the US still say they are subject to a deposit of like 5 cents, but only in certain states. I've never lived anywhere that had an active bottle return program for glass.

Refillable bottles and plastic are not incompatible. The bottles just need to be durable enough. They will still be lighter than glass which will save fuel used for transporting them.

I think that the combination of carbon emissions and physical waste from reusing a plastic bottle 25 times and then recycling it are still likely to be lower than producing a glass bottle and hoping it gets recycled.

But a glass bottle weighs 10x what a plastic bottle does, resulting in significantly more fuel usage and greenhouse emissions.

PET bottles are widely recycled, at something like 90% in Norway and 80% in Japan. Versus 25-30% in the US. The issue in the US is literally that people just throw them in the trash or on the side of the road, outside of the six states that have a deposit.

Statista link, with some of the rough figures corroborated by Wikipedia:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1166550/plastic-bottle-r...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PET_bottle_recycling

The issue is the lack of will, and opposition, to actually put them in a place where the materials can be recycled...and to make it cheaper (through tax incentives) to recycle the material than to use new plastic.

Those glass bottles would end up in the trash or in the road too, as things stand. It's where I already see them go most of the time. Moving from a recycling-friendly state to a southern state has been infuriating in that regard.

> more fuel usage and greenhouse emissions

Again coca-cola can make the full logistical operation EV based (bar maritime) and offset with deploying renewables. If they care.

Glass can be either washed (even more energy saving) or fully recycled, all the time, 100% of the time.

PET :

- can only be recyclable a few N cycles and becomes increasingly brittle when recycled.

- There is no such thing as transparent recycled PET

Those are the two core reasons why none of the major manufacturers actually use recycled PET or use it fractionally (10 to 30% PET, which marketing will spin with 'using (some) plastic from 100% recycled materials')

The sad story about the economics of this is that recycled PET is not nearly good quality enough to be used for packaging leading to it being used in plastic poles or road substrates and further contributing to microplastics in the waterways.

It's a scam through and through.

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