I'd outlaw sauce bottles which make getting it all out harder, especially the ones which don't have the opening at the bottom and make it impossible to put the bottle with the opening facing downwards.
I'd outlaw sauce bottles which make getting it all out harder, especially the ones which don't have the opening at the bottom and make it impossible to put the bottle with the opening facing downwards.
Single-use plastic packaging! All packaging now comes in a set of standard ISO sizes and satisfying some engineering constraints and requirements. You get a Coke from a convenience store - it comes as a 0.5L glass bottle. You finish with it, put it on a rack inside the store with all the other empty 0.5L bottles to be taken back to the factory to be washed and inspected for chips and reused. It could be filled with Pepsi next time! Just slap on a new paper label.
I wouldn't call it a silly issue myself. I'd ban all plastic packaging unless proven to have no alternative. I'm also infiuriated with countries for making easily recyclable materials actively hard to recycle: speaking of glass. They make it so you have to take it to a recycling point, which can be sparse depending on your idea. Glass and metals are amazing for recycling. But no, make everything plastic and actively push people away from purchasing glass by making them have to go out of their way to recycle it. Plastic bottles frequently aren't even better. I had multiple plastic sauce bottles break akin to glass and leak out.
Yes! Which is why my idea is to have a collection point at every point of sale. And the first aim will be to reuse the packaging, not even recycle it (melt it down)! This is why ISO standardization is necessary - you don't want to keep track of Coke bottles and Pepsi bottles, they need to be identical. The same truck that delivers a pallet of bottles from the factory to your store will take the pallet of empties out.
I cannot agree on the reuse. The amount of CO2 emited from the extra transportation and water wasted on cleaning, plus the possibility of lower sanitary quality all add into it making less sense than recycling, but perhaps I'm wrong and those are of lesser negative value than the process of recycling.
The numbers I heard is that reusing a bottle is less energy intensive than melting it down. It's sanitary if you sterilize it properly by heating to >100°C, which is still much less energy than heating it to 1723°C to melt. As for water, I try to think on a 100 year time scale, where water is a renewable resource, but plastic is not.
It's true that the energy savings will be wasted if you end up trucking the pallet of glass soda bottles all the way across America! But you shouldn't be trucking bottles that far anyway - you should be sending rail tanker cars full of syrup to a bottling plant in each state and use local water to mix it.
Everything should be glass or aluminum. Preferably aluminum since you don't really have to worry about mixtures and cleaning it, you just melt it down and reshape it. With glass, you have to separate out the different types, and it still breaks down each recycle, I believe, since they mix silica with other compounds to make different kinds of glass.
I honestly don't understand stand why plastic beverage bottles are still a thing. Cans work perfectly. And if you insist on bottles, they can make aluminum cans too.
Single use plastic in general. I skipped bagging my veggies at the grocer today because it felt wasteful.
I’m on board with this except instead of reusable glass bottles that need to be transported around, you’re responsible for your own reusable bottle/mug/thermos and you can only get beverages from a soda fountain.