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> 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 no

• 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.