My thought is that it’s incredible how enormous the packaged drink market is. Tap water + filter + insulated bottle. Profit.
I understand that not everyone has the luxury of planning ahead but the drink market should be less than half of what it is today. Most people drink bottled drinks because of marketing and subliminal pressures and habits.
There are alternatives to plastic. As stupidly expensive as it is, Liquid Death is water in a can. I’ve also seen water in paper cartons and larger bottles made of glass. Soda is available in cans as well. Teas and juices are available in glass. You may be choosing to drink a particular brand that’s only available in plastic.
You have plenty of choices. You have the choice to drink a particular product out of plastic. You have the choice to not drink that. You may be faced with having to pay a little more or to drink something that’s not your favorite. In an ideal world, more people would spend a little more on their purchases to increase demand for the manufacturing of a product which could bring prices down while decreasing demand and manufacturing of popular packaging.
I’m an Uber driver and I buy so many bottled drinks. My plan is to just get like two or three liter bottles to keep in the car to hydrate me for the day off tap water from home.
Mostly just to save myself money though. Gotta get a buffer built and I’m just barely making it now.
I love that you’ve recognized an opportunity for improvement and established a reasonable solution.
Carbonated drinks are tough but if you’re looking for something other than water, make some iced tea from scratch or from powered form or fruit juice from concentrate - anything you can buy in bulk - to keep in insulated bottles.
It’s somewhat more expensive, and under current rules disposal is basically not the manufacturer’s problem, or even the consumer’s. Are they more common in (I assume) the UK?
Money. Plastic is so integrated into the supply chain that divesting from it would require retooling probably thousands of bottling plants, at significant expense, with no guarantee of ROI.
Then give a loan to a worker co-op that would like to take over and force THAT sale to happen. That way the everything is equally shared amongst the workers, diffusing the wealth and power into the working class.
Not the vast majority going to some billionaires looking to undermine the very nation they were founded.
Increase the costs by adding taxes to the plastic that account. Sucks to use the stick instead of the carrot, but if it’s a real societal cost then the cost should be paid by those introducing it. They’d raise prices for these goods and consumers can decide if it’s still worth buying.
We have a water company here that sells water in cans called Liquid Death, I don’t know if they are international or not.
We also have beer companies that use aluminum bottles over cans, might just be Bud Light and Coors but I dont drink cheap pilsners.
We don’t recycle enough and don’t have the capacity for processing if we did recycle enough. There is no real financial incentive for companies to spend more on aluminum bottles vs cans or plastic. Aluminum bottles have a plastic liner because drinking out of raw aluminum tastes bad and might contribute to Alzheimer’s(might not be true).
I want us to go back to glass bottles but we stopped using them so much because we are terrible people and leave broken glass everywhere and plastic is better for shareholders. Seriously, we we were using glass the amount of broken glass shards in parks, streets, sidewalks, parking lots was a problem when I was a kid.
Ya but it isn’t the cans, glass bottles, and cardboard that’s causing permanent environmental damage. It’s plastic that we are manufacturing daily all for it to wind up in a landfill and the side of the road which finds its way into rivers, lakes , oceans and pretty much everywhere else.
The lack of recycling glass isn’t what’s killing us. It’s plastic.
Always. We used steel before then because it wouldn’t react with the drink. We always knew aluminum cans would be cheaper, but couldn’t figure out how to protect the flavor and carbonation until Coors figured out how to line it with plastic. He shared the process for free with his competition because he knew a recycling program would scale really well.
That’s not entirely true. In the early days they used wax to line the cans because steel still leaves a taste in the drink. It just didn’t work very well and also caused carbonation issues as the CO2 diffused into the wax.
Hmm. I wonder if this is true for all the various other acidic canned products. I use cans heavily in my cooking, so this is worrisome. Would the old Shackleton cans be wax-lined?
Glass is an option, or course, which is used in home canning.
It’s true, but the amount of plastic in the cans is pretty negligible, especially compared to plastic bottles and the aluminum can is still by far the most recyclable beverage container.
Also there are new linings that don’t use plastic but natural materials called oleoresinous linings but they’re not good for acidic things so they’re not very wildly used.
Well when it comes to water I feel like it has a lot to do with corporate events and advertising. If you are in Florida for example and the water tastes like it’s been filtered with dead fish you might be more inclined to grab a bottle.
As for soda I think it has a lot to do with the cost of using glass bottles. People don’t really get them refilled. They just recycle them.
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