Glass vs Plastic Bottles
The cluster debates the merits of reusable glass bottles versus disposable plastic ones for beverages like water, focusing on environmental impact, recyclability, transportation costs, weight, fragility, and proposals for deposit-return systems or bans on plastic.
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It's not common with refills for those bottles? (more often than not the refills are also in some kind of plastic - so not sure how much plastic it saves though)
There are reusable glass bottles, at least where I live.
Is that better or worse than disposable bottles?
just ban plastic bottles.... cans work just fine.
You can, and often do, reuse plastic bottles. Water dispensers are very popular in some places and they use recyclable 19l plastic bottles. Glass is just too heavy and fragile for transporting water and if I understand correctly metal still needs plastic lining so that it doesn't react with fluids.
> Buy the glass bottleMaybe go for the aluminum can instead. In the age of single-stream recycling, glass doesn't get recycled all that much more than plastic does. (Some sources suggest it gets recycled even less.) Worse, it tends to render other materials unrecyclable when it shatters and contaminates them with shards.Also, the can weighs less, which means less pollution incidental to transportation.
You are not wrong, but in some countries they collect, wash, and and reuse glass (and even special kinds of plastic) bottles. According to my parents that used to be standard practice in the United States. Someone should do the math first obviously but it seems like a great idea to me. If bottling is done locally you aren’t transporting the bottles long distance, and quite significantly in my mind glass is inert so if it does get into the environment, it isn’t leaching microplastics into the env
And it'll still be worse than the classic, returnable and reused, glass bottles.
Plastic water bottles? Why not?
Glass bottles cost a lot to transport, occupy a lot of space, must be washed and sterilised. PET bottles are crushed in the machine that you return them to so they occupy less space and are much lighter. Here in Norway where most drinks containers have a deposit we have almost completely switched to PET bottles and aluminium cans for beer and soft drinks on the grounds that recycling PET bottles and aluminium cans is cheaper than reusing glass ones.