One of the key issues with using bottles is the cost, weight and the fact that there is a lot of breakage. The weight alone increases the cost of the supply chain by several times.
One key invention which could really help here is flexible glass packaging. Interestingly, one of the lost technologies from the Roman era is flexible glass:
The story of flexible glass had contemporary doubters. My guess is it’s likely apocryphal but created as a fable with political and economic undertones.
> The weight alone increases the cost of the supply chain by several times.
I suspect that matters a lot more when all the local recycling plants have shut down because a vendor in a different country offered such good pricing for a while that nobody could/wanted to compete, but has since greatly raised they prices.
Weight does matter quite a bit when shipping something literally halfway around the world, but we don't have to ship it around the world. We need to get our own capacity to recycle locally built up again.
Weight matters less than you would think for long distance shipping - look at ore and crude oil for one both could have /major/ weight savings by in situ refining but the economics confirm shipping it to be refined is the winner.
Global shipping's sheer scale tends to snap people's intuitions in two compared to the actual numbers as it feels like it really shouldn't be this efficient by cost or carbon. The reality is that when you keep on getting bigger and bigger container ships the efficency when fully loaded keeps going up. Think of it like how a diesel train is more efficent than a highway of commuters despite the tonnage difference between one car and a full train.
The current situation with recycling is that China used to take almost everything, and then over the last few years it's gone from that to first "only very clean stuff" to "we don't want certain materials at all". Unfortunately, since they were such a reliable vendor for so long, many of the local recycling plants shut down, here and elsewhere in the world, and a lot of stuff we used to recycle ends up in the landfill, but there's also a lot of stuff that's right on the edge, so some recycling centers store it for a period hoping the economics make sense in the near future as markets fluctuate.
Now, global shipping is cheap, but I'm sure for large portions of the country there's also a portion of the cost which is even getting the goods to a large port, which may be hundreds or thousands of miles away. Localized recycling helps not only with the the global shipping, but also a portion of the local shipping, as well as likely bringing back capacity to recycle goods that we just can't feasibly do economically right now. Some of that is shipping cost, some of it is just rectifying the mistakes of depending almost wholly on an outside vendor that then cut off service.
one of the reasons the cost and weight of glass is such a problem is because the supply chains have consolidated around huge centralized bottling plants that require the transport of individually-packaged goods clear across the country.
bottling isn't a specialized task, it can be done anywhere. If companies were forced to pay the true cost of their plastic packaging, we might see a return to a system where bottling plants were set up locally, provided local jobs in smaller communities, and customers could return their used glass bottles directly to the local bottling plant for sterilization and re-use.
Silocone is used for food packaging but, as far as I know, I do not know any company shipping food in silicone bottles. However, silicone food packaging bags exist:
All food containers must be recyclable or compostable. This should be a rule across the globe.
We should also ban single-use plastic. If costs need to go up, then let them go up. Consumers need to understand the costs of their consumption and we can’t destroy our planet so that corporations can be more profitable.
I agree. But an average human won't. A perceived cost increase or to put it more generally a perceived life standard decrease incurs a strong emotion in humans. Let earth and our future be be damned, I want more dopamine in my brain as soon as possible. This is the reason why most people live in debt, instead of an obviously optimal alternative of saving up for your purchases. We evolved in an unstable world, where future was uncertain and happiness now was worth a lot more than the possibility of happiness in the future.
It doesn't matter if people like it or not, you just make it so companies or people have to pay for the negative externalities through taxes or regulation and the problem is solved. The market will naturally rebalance and innovate under the new constraints.
If only we had responsible, effective government with the balls to do what has to be done to protect the future. This business of short term thinking and to hell with the future is not only ruining things it is very literally current generations stealing from future generations.
I think we should make a law to compensate for that. Those social security obligations where the current working generations pay for past generations retirement? Let's reduce that considerably. Let's also raise estate taxes. It's fair, they created and benefited from this mess and then left it to us to bear.
I don't think that policies like carbon taxes are that terribly unpopular (depends on the location.)
But even then democratic governments do things that are unpopular all the time. I don't think it's untenable. But even if it cost politicians their re-election, it's still the right thing to do.
Gillet jaunes disagree very strongly. Even if an idea is popular in principle and is a good idea there can be tons of anger over whose particular ox is gored by it, regardless of how skewed the priorities may be in the grand scheme of things if it is perceived as "unfair".
From barely visible offshore wind turbine complaints in Martha's Vineyard, to reluctance of former coal miners to retrain to less lucrative industries to the original luddites solving problems can piss /a lot/ of people off.
It doesn't make them non-viable but it isn't as easy as you would think from superficial popularity.
But isn't the whole thing "now oil and oil-based-products are bad" kind of unfair to all the developing nations? We, the rich western countries, we're able to profit of the non-sustainable benefits we got from fossil fuels and their products, while a large part of the earth's population didn't profit nearly as much as we have.
This is a line of thinking I've seen underrepresented in a lot of the discussions about the environment and the future of our planet and species in general.
They are also stuck for better or worse as "technological vassals" as not driving research and development. This isn't a slight on their intellectual capabilities at all but an acknowledgement of realities and scales - they are just as human as us. Third world nations don't develop their own novel weapons systems beyond guerilla repurposing like technical trucks - they don't have the budget for it. Clever individuals can still come up with something new but they lack the institutional support for it to be "big".
One silver lining they get is R&D of others can help them skip the step some steps compared to the past west's development paths. Cell phones connected the third world in absense of wires and individual autorouting compared to party lines and operator based dispatches. Something similar is happening to a degree with renewables.
Renewables are a nice fit to them in several ways, the storage and grid free unreliability is unfortunately nothing new to them. It is a bit of a situational dubious blessing like "We don't need to worry about chemo being carcogenic - you already have stage 3 cancer". Not ideal but few things are for the third world even if they are improving.
One of the costs is weight, which means that transporting glass bottles releases more CO2. We also shouldn’t underestimate how dangerous glass can be when dropped.
> We should also ban single-use plastic. If costs need to go up, then let them go up. Consumers need to understand the costs of their consumption and we can’t destroy our planet so that corporations can be more profitable.
The hitch is affordability for people with lower incomes. While it is easy to be critical about single serving beverages and over packages potato chips, the vast majority of goods found in most grocery stores are packaged.
> While it is easy to be critical about single serving beverages and over packages potato chips, the vast majority of goods found in most grocery stores are packaged.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that we need to do away with packaged foods entirely. the fundamental relationship between surface area and volume means we can improve things substantially just by using bigger containers. a plastic quart-sized container of apple sauce still uses a lot less plastic than two four packs of single-serving cups. once you're buying and selling food in larger containers, the material cost of the container contributes less to the total cost of the product, leaving some headroom to use more expensive materials.
That makes sense, and I was thinking along similar lines in terms of the cost of food, but it is also something that has to be driven by consumers. Government regulation may help, but it may not.
Getting ride of single serving packaging cannot really be done through the initiative of individual businesses. Consumers will simply switch to products providing single serving packages if that is what they desire. What has to be changed is the desire. You also have to consider that there are cases when small package sizes are legitimate, such as when someone uses very little of a product.
Regulation may not solve the problem either. Some people simply prefer single use packaging over cleaning and reusing smaller containers. Consider something like school lunches. When schools ask families to pack lunches using reusable containers, there is often a backlash and a few who simply don't understand the concept of reusable packaging. Quite often, things get sent in baggies or plastic wrap or inexpensive containers that are only used a handful of times before being tossed. This is ignoring the world of adult lunches, where adults often do the same or worse (e.g. ordering food in disposable packaging).
As simple as the solutions may sound, getting people to go along with it is a difficult problem.
It's not so corporations can be more profitable. It's so poor people can eat. Raise the price of food 20% for heavy but recyclable containers and suddenly 1 of 5 poor kids doesn't get enough to eat.
This is why finding sustainable solutions that lower costs, not raise them is the dream solution.
Syringes, urine cups, stool sample collection cups, catheters, condoms - these days nobody wants to go through the hassle of washing and sanitizing certain items for reuse. A single-use plastic ban would make dealing with biohazards an energy and chemically intensive cleaning nightmare.
That's real easy to say when you work in an air conditioned office and shop at whole foods. Sure the demographics most represented here could absorb the cost but these demographics are a minority in the first word and a tiny minority globally.
Economic stability is what permits people to have the free time to care about abstract things like "the environment". Raise the cost of food, raise the cost of fuel, "internalize the externalities" or whatever the doublespeak of the day is, and you're gonna have a hell of a lot more people living on the edge and those people are gonna care a hell of a lot more about their immediate needs than about the environment (and they'll vote accordingly). These changes might look small at a micro level but at a macro level anything that decreases standard of living makes people prioritize their short term needs over the long term.
We're in an era of companies worth trillions and their owners worth billions. It's silly to say we have too few resources to provide enough economic stability for people to care about the environment, meanwhile mega yachts are being made and islands are being purchased by an uber wealthy elite class, and there are people who will defend that behavior, all because they have a lot of money, so it must be okay.
Market driven economies that do not take into account environmental destruction and which cannot come to terms with wealth inequalities will be a huge danger to the future plight of humanity. Waiting for the market to "naturally" react by raising prices due to resource scarcity and destruction of supply chains due to environmental hazards will be too slow, and too little too late.
Those that buy yachts and islands are a lot less frequent though. It's obscene, I agree, but it's not like everybody was well-off if you just nationalized Jeff Bezoz' wealth.
You don't have to wait for the market, you just need to make sure that proposed policies aren't massively affecting the lower classes. Food insecurity isn't a good foundation for a stable and peaceful society. When you're artificially generating it, you might want to take care of the poverty first, not the other way around.
The problem is that we're wringing our hands over prices rising due to taking the environment into account, we do not wring our hands much when prices rise to fatten up the paydays for elite classes. Food scarcity is already an issue, and excess at the top, is already an issue. A lot of the economy is based on things being disposable, even in some cases to the point of humans being disposable objects(factory towns, sweatshops, "essential workers"). We'll eventually need to come to terms with ways to handle environmental damage better, and not in a passive way that just socializes that debt and damage onto the poor and the future generations, like we're doing now. The endless consumption/growth economy needs to evolve into a sustainable economy. Obviously there are entrenched interests that want to maintain the status quo until the world is on fire.
Seriously, something like 50 of them cost in the $2-3M range, which is less than a lot of houses in the Bay Area. (Google says that Zillow says that the median price of a house sold in Palo Alto is $2.6M.) There are also three currently listed from $59k-$68k.
I thought the Romans were known to outright despise glass, although that was in architectural contexts. Flexible glass sounds very unlike them given references to pottery and wineskins instead.
One key invention which could really help here is flexible glass packaging. Interestingly, one of the lost technologies from the Roman era is flexible glass:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_glass
Corning does have flexible glass, but used primarily for interiors and not for packaging: https://www.corning.com/in/en/innovation/corning-emerging-in...