They could use the Euro Bottle or NRW Bottle refill glass bottles, that a lot of European countries ate using. They’re being refilled 12 times on average.
I don’t like cans because the drink gets so hot so fast, it isn’t insulating at all, but in general don’t buy individually packaged anything. Lots of glass bottles of booze and wine, but much less “turnover” that way, a few a month. Water from the tap, fancy water we have a Lifestraw pitcher in the refrigerator (tap water is safe here but the filtered cooled water is delicious). Bring an empty water bottle to concerts, or the sealed liter bottle (whichever is allowed).
So not none, still a few here and there, now and then. But mostly just try to avoid anything packed for individual servings.
Weight is also a factor. All these bottles/etc are often transported in very carbon intensive supply chains. Any additional weight scales that footprint and has to be managed.
Same. The most recent time I bought a plastic bottle was on a recent holiday for a week-long car trip away from home in a country where tap water was not drinkable. I was happy to see they had big 10-liter bottles in the shop so I could refill my reusable water bottle during the whole trip.
You do realize that aluminum bottles are plastic bottles yes ? Plastic bottle with a thin aluminium insert to block sunlight from degrading the contents.
Oh yeah let me just whip out my interdimensional crucible and burn off the plastic between the liquid and the metal so I can drink my beverage in peace.
The BPA coating is what I’m referring to. A lot of people are not fond of plastic bottles because they want to avoid BPA leeching jntk their drink. Switching to a can lined with BPA doesn’t seem to help the issue at all.
Honestly, not much that can be done other than voicing concerns to your representatives. Thankfully, here in EU a resolution has been passed earlier this year banning BPA and other bisphenols. Hopefully it gets put into action soon.
I buy distilled water for my daughter’s baby formula bottles. They all come in plastic jugs and I really wish I could just bring a glass jar somewhere to get it refilled. Because I just know all that plastic is leeching into the water.
It’s a shame that glass jars are so uncommon around here. The plastic is so wasteful.
We have saturated our environment with aluminum to the point where one of our “background ailments” is light metal poisoning from aluminum - most notably as a decline in intelligence. We keep ‘choosing’ the cheapest easiest solution to liquids packaging and distribution - and each one of them - EXCEPT GLASS - has come back to bite us on the ass.
Do you have any sources for this fairly common naturally occurring biologically important, and in human uses bioinert metal causing “light metal poisoning” from either natural background doses or incidental from human pollution?
I don’t want acute poisoning, specifically sources on chronic background doses.
Since when is aluminium biologically important? I’m under the impression that humans (and other life?) do not need aluminium at all.
Having said that, my info is that it’s nothing to worry about. It is very common in food (naturally and since forever), and the body can get rid of it, and they haven’t been able to show adverse effects except in very very high doses. That’s the messaging I’ve been seeing anyway.
You’re in fact right, I was hedging a bet that the abundance of aluminum meant it’d be used by some random metabolic processes somewhere, which it probably is, but still none found.
No. Lead is another though. Aluminum isn’t common at all because it’s locked up in bauxite, which must be refined in order to ‘release’ the aluminum content.
The world has done an excellent job of releasing aluminum from it’s ‘prison’, and now aluminum is “loose” and causing problems with human cognitive abilities. (actually, all animals - but it’s hard to notice a decline in mental ability in animals).
Light metal’s poisoning, radioactive fallout from over 5,000 nuclear explosions, lead, CO2, decline in O2 atmospheric content… we’ve caused ourselves to start devolving.
Me, and I’m pretty sure the guy I was replying to, were both talking about plastic recycling, not aluminum recycling, replying to OP statement: I am currently trying to avoid using plastic packed drinks as much as possible due to it’s limited and finite recycle count.
One important thing to keep in mind that is that you cannot “just” make things from aluminium.
One reason the beverage can gets away with using so little alu for so much content is that that it’s pressurized and hence held in shape by its very content. This is why flat drinks have to have the extra air inside it be overpressurized and hence will stil fizz briefly when opened. And the shape of a bottle is not good for being held up by uniform pressure.
We can put non-pressurized things into it when either the content is light (cremes etc) or is in itself rather stable (powders). But even then we use a lot of metal for the container. To truly save, it needs to be something that pressurizes from the inside, which among other things can be inherently unsafe (spray cans come to mind, don’t puncture them).
Aluminum is fine if you’re going to pour your drink into a glass, but despite the plastic inner sleeve you’re still going to taste the metal edge if you sip from the can.
Imo glass bottle is king. Then can, then plastic bottle if I’m in the middle of the Mojave desert having walked for 3 days with absolutely no form of hydration and am literally on the cusp of death. It tastes like shit and is bad for environment; not recyclable. Fuck plastic bottles.
As a klutz, with stupid tile floors I can’t afford to replace, I have come to appreciate plastic cups. Only having to clean up the spilled liquid, not deal with trying to protect kids and cats and my feet and hands as I scramble to get every shard, is worth the flatness of flavor.
It’s a different type of plastic, AFAIK it’s like a spray on polymer for the aluminum cans; But I think the biggest factor is probably UV degradation of the ingredients in the soda with the clear plastic bottles.
Maybe it’s for the same reason Moscow Mules are served in copper mugs. The container conducts heat well and therefore feels very cold to the touch when you put your lips on it, which enhances the feeling of it being refreshing.
Do you remember when Sun Chips changed their chip bag material to a more environmentally friendly compostable material? People lost their minds. Why? Because the bag crinkled a lot. All of the boring late night talk shows made fun of Sun Chips bags. So, they switched it back to the old bags.
Moral of the story is that people don’t care if something is better for the environment if it inconveniences them now. If everything was in cans people would cry because they can’t close them or whatever. In fact, many items that were previously sold in cans are now plastic. Also, money… Cheaper to wrap water in plastic.
You can still buy Coca-cola in glass bottles if you look hard enough. But they are pricey.
I’m curious how much the environmental costs of shipping products in aluminum containers v. lighter plastic containers changes the equation.
I also tend to think that an even better solution would be to have the consumer be the one with the container, and shipping the product in bulk, to be dispensed as a bulk item at a retail location. E.g., the packaging for shipping is the tank that the truck is towing, rather than a trailer full of individual use bottles.
Besides convenience, I think a lot of container waste is also caused by our litigious society. If you pour milk into my container and I later sue you because it makes me sick, you might decide your best defense is to sell all milk in sealed containers. (And if someone poisons some containers, you’ll add tamper-proof layers.)
Capitalism could solve this no problem if we just taxed externalities. Don’t even have to hit every level of the supply chain, just a big tax on fossil carbon removed from the ground, and maybe another tax where it gets transformed into plastic (a sort of externality-added tax).
The market then decided what’s still worth making and what’s not, based on the total cost including the new taxes, weighed against how much people are willing to pay for the stuff.
It’s also worth noting that transport does not have a zero cost on the environment. It’s why we did away with glass, it’s so heavy it actually becomes carbon intensive to transport. Especially when you account for greater spoilage percentages (due to the glass being mishandled and breaking more often than alternatives). The equation isn’t as simple as it would seem. The true solution is less likely single use drink containers of any kind and more likely some sort of reusable bottle you carry around with you and could fill up.
I got laughed at on other platforms by older generations for even suggesting the notion of mild inconvenience to make future generations lives easier.
They don’t want us or them to have a better life, not even if it costs them nothing - but ESPECIALLY not if they have to do literally anything differently.
This is where I dispair about the future of walkable cities and trains. Can’t even get a section of the population to accept stopping to charge an EV every two hours for a whole 20 minutes during the road trip they take once a month, if that. How can we convince those people to bike or take trains?
I’ve given up trying to convince them. They’re a vocal minority. Who I talk to and work with are the quieter ones. I’ve found on posts and comment sections there are people who are asking honest questions and are receptive. Scroll past the chaff and you’ll find them. We have a new train opening in our city and I spent a couple hours explaining to people where parking was available, how to ride it, how to pay for fare, etc. People were genuinely excited to hear that people like me are riding it! A lot of it is just anxiety of never taking transit before, and not knowing how to get started.
We don’t have Sun Chips here so I’m not aware of this, but I’d be really curious to learn how much of that freakout was genuine and how much was engineered by entities with a vested interest in maintaining status quo.
Certainly loud, but I think the way forward should have been engineering a quieter version instead of going back to plastic. And in the meantime use idk… a bowl?
Edit: use a bowl, meaning put the crisps in the bowl when you open them if the noise bothers you
Not that it isn’t still junk food and horrible for you. HFCS might be a worse form of sugar, but in the end they’re still refined sugars. It’s worth noting that Mexico and the US have similar obesity rates. There are more factors than just beverages involved, but it is one.
At the time, I thought the Sun chips bag situation was hilarious. If I think back on it now, it’s really sad. Yes, the bag was significantly louder than the original bag. But I feel like we’re going to need to make some sacrifices as a society for the environment. And that seems like a really, really tiny sacrifice.
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