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> We need to stop plastic polluttion now, or im afraid the earths ecosystem will collapse sooner or later. I'm afraid that if we hurry into it, there will be a

> We need to stop plastic polluttion now, or im afraid the earths ecosystem will collapse sooner or later. I'm afraid that if we hurry into it, there will be all sorts of unintended consequences. I also suspect that it's harder than we realize to keep track of what building houses the nuclear reactor and which one is the bike shed. Going from plastic soda bottles back to glass ones, for example, would probably be an environmental disaster. It takes so very much energy to manufacture glass, and it takes so very much fuel to truck it around. I think, rather than micro-focusing on one specific bogeyman, what I'd really like to see is an attack on packaging-related waste and pollution in general.

vict00ms 8y ago
> Going from plastic soda bottles back to glass ones, for example, would probably be an environmental disaster. This is only true if said glass bottles were not reusable (and their reuse wasn't compelled in some fashion).
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  Yup. That's the catch right there - practically speaking, and on a commercial scale, glass bottles aren't reusable. At least, not anymore. Over the past couple decades, a lot of barriers have been put up to prevent the re-use of glass containers: Local bottling facilities have consolidated into regional ones, the number of different brands of beverage available on store shelves has increased enormously, many areas have passed laws that outright ban the reuse of glass containers, glass containers are no longer manufactured to be durable enough for repeated use, they now come in far too wide a variety of shapes to work well with sanitization equipment, etc etc. A simple ban on plastic bottles would address none of this. You'd have to look at the big picture to be sure you can achieve good results. I'd wager that we'd get much better results by instead introducing a tax on, say, every beverage container that enters the waste stream. Or, maybe easier to enforce, that cannot be proven not to have entered the waste stream. That would be a single legislative string to pull that would give the industry a strong economic incentive to address all (or at least most) of the real causes of the problem.

vict00ms 8y ago

> Going from plastic soda bottles back to glass ones, for example, would probably be an environmental disaster. This is only true if said glass bottles were not reusable (and their reuse wasn't compelled in some fashion).

bunderbunder 8y ago
Yup. That's the catch right there - practically speaking, and on a commercial scale, glass bottles aren't reusable. At least, not anymore. Over the past couple decades, a lot of barriers have been put up to prevent the re-use of glass containers: Local bottling facilities have consolidated into regional ones, the number of different brands of beverage available on store shelves has increased enormously, many areas have passed laws that outright ban the reuse of glass containers, glass containers are no longer manufactured to be durable enough for repeated use, they now come in far too wide a variety of shapes to work well with sanitization equipment, etc etc. A simple ban on plastic bottles would address none of this. You'd have to look at the big picture to be sure you can achieve good results. I'd wager that we'd get much better results by instead introducing a tax on, say, every beverage container that enters the waste stream. Or, maybe easier to enforce, that cannot be proven not to have entered the waste stream. That would be a single legislative string to pull that would give the industry a strong economic incentive to address all (or at least most) of the real causes of the problem.