Well that comes as a bit of a shock. :(
I went back to getting milk delivered because of the glass bottles.
I keep wondering about how doable it would be to revert back to reusable containers for soft drinks, except using some sort of common infrastructure and standardized bottle instead of the each company maintaining its own system. The current system of single use contains is never going to measure up to washing and refilling a glass container.
It seems to be quite hard to know what to do for the best. I did read somewhere that a glass milk bottle had an average of a 14 delivery life span.
At least for milk this was AFAIK analyzed and found to be wrong, i.e. the transport and washing of glass bottles has a higher impact on the environment then single use tetra-packs or those thin-walled plastic bags that are less commonly used.
Of course these cardboard containers are not suitable for carbonated beverages and I suspect the calculation is somewhat different for the stronger type of plastic or metal containers necessary for that.
However I personally see little wrong with on the spot mixing and carbonating dispensers like used by the fast-food chains for delivering these type of drinks as you only need to ship the concentrate.
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Even if rest of your life you will buy beverages in wooden bucket it would not solve the environmental problem, just give you an egoistic feeling of contribution… and of course it is all about to create a new type of consumer - “'eco consumer”, nothing more…
Glass has always seemed a bit too classy and le rich to me. Its heavyweight and material usage always ticks me off. Recycled plastic is quite better, metal containers even better.
In germany we have glass bottles that are reused, you pay a per bottle deposit (0,08€, non-reusable is 0,25€) and get it back when you bring the bottle back to the market. The market will send the bottle back to the company it came from and they will clean it and reuse it for bottling again if it’s still good.
There is also reuse for plastic bottles, but it is less common, at least everywhere I lived. (reuse is done regionally) Also they can’t be reused as often as glass bottles. One could reuse metal containers, but that isn’t done. I’d guess because they aren’t transparent and so cannot be inspected by bottling systems as easily.
Soft-drinks usually aren’t reusable, because they aren’t distributed locally.
How eco-friendy the refilling of glass bottles is, depends on the distance they have to be transported. Utopia has a (German) article about it.
But then you could make like 5-10 plastic bottles per glass bottle, as far as the entire recycling and production cost goes.
Yeah probably, they need less energy to produce. But you need to mix in some fresh material for recycling and they are way worse than all alternatives when not recycled. Ideally everyone would just use their own reusable containers, I guess.
