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The solution is to standardise packaging so that it can be re-used by multiple brands and companies, with just a clean out and new set of logos glued on. This

The solution is to standardise packaging so that it can be re-used by multiple brands and companies, with just a clean out and new set of logos glued on. This might not be suitable for a Pringles can, but at least suitable for glass containers and bottles.

flyinghamster 5y ago
Fifty years ago, soda was generally sold in returnable glass bottles, which would be trucked back to the bottling plant, sanitized, and reused. But that was too inconvenient, I guess. First came thin glass disposables, and then plastic took over. At least aluminum cans (and steel, for that matter) are readily recyclable. Coca-Cola bottles had their originating bottling plant stamped into the bottom.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  >Fifty years ago, soda was generally sold in returnable glass bottles It still is in India (at least sometimes). I suspect rising labour costs killed this industry, though. Why take on a logistical challenge you don't have to?
- YokoZar 5y ago
  The energy and water costs of cleaning and sanitizing reusable containers can be very substantial. It seems nicer to "reuse" a bottle, but it may genuinely be the case that it's less impactful to just make a new one (preferably out of recycled materials).
  - Factorium 5y ago
    Reusing glass uses a similar amount of water and about 30-40% of the energy as recycling: https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/282173/1-s2.0-S2212827119X00037/1-s2.0-S2212827119300563/main.pdf?X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEGYaCXVzLWVhc3QtMSJHMEUCIQD9Qifj%2BlAFsZaHwEiaKoA3zv5UflZP%2F4BNK3jIALQoGAIgGkZc5BpkVHV4IS3jwz9sMuUP36B9XEjLobdKWSz6CZEqgwQI7%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2FARAEGgwwNTkwMDM1NDY4NjUiDAI3FNMv4ehRiZvZFSrXA%2BFeSHFobACl2g3RpuUU8tV2joqS6YFOfeLkTAjk3fA27fw1xUxRQ5K1j3Hs8vreSFlnkzqHBTJNZREa2THJPH2FmiGQv5tisyuxZ1sa4afGr9DuWanL150YucFWosbQYZE7rCULmkbd5jR6h33vDidDiXqLw54lWWfpipQejif3xRMprEmnTTHqMKyyVBtqULoHozxGMNRoH30Bx%2BUC%2BeDc58erCTFUQ6%2Bm4ME7pv0IFoagkEPRWh98LXKom1VWHRJlc%2BlkPkmRsQf36A1vmb86wCTJbipblov1Hpw7TG55dPTBCxLd4iCk%2Be%2F5CG0F3KwREGYTHUR0biqbEUJ1RDL7eYI2QQi456ipz1%2FmmOiq4RLmW%2FxXuzVB5oP3V0nyCnB1OKY2sNPrroT9jRdWEGXvrY1VSM7MUSfyZWMEZTyAvIXEso13yCLSwgYouECIBmeRPvyMJwdULt3oJWoVmivd8XLZSfZ3Ao2OKat71vsE8NBdEGuxu%2BQx7G3gISIMWvhf4cFz2TWPX3%2FTN4OysV0F93EGjiZhTN4Q1lZdiaDP2m3x3F2nJk2nKRyJm6oB39sdBLwbMqiDdg4KO5xDVoDJvghxPKpKpq2T7XadNfUUcx%2BUJkX24jDS48WLBjqlAeGAf71T9iqXpOrWITZuQPt1IDKuxfUL8yVW3w4SIW0CYSiXpvUnYbT2r%2BUHxwsMmOKjOwOLUWFf55nxKVSG1TDUie9RjpwhZeuaQkdf1OAkJpTpWNAbSJ1b6is%2BUKylC%2BI%2BrUiZ1B6QhF7uhaHoyNw7NphWYxxUx232ipPNfxueYHW9poycQX6Z2ICzc9eEmx%2FVMzMS9HE0jz1KiDvPTDo7%2BZxhYA%3D%3D&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20211021T143323Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAQ3PHCVTYZJCEPNRI%2F20211021%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=2feaef3d8d919f6a9dbff539152b82dd7af3c32c48b4140d04f6a5ff5469fef7&hash=c9ed574805c993058ceedb73034497d92887c2d2e7c0e0b5cd0409722b0243c0&host=68042c943591013ac2b2430a89b270f6af2c76d8dfd086a07176afe7c76c2c61&pii=S2212827119300563&tid=spdf-ea611fa5-e074-40fb-9a29-5a384613d6b4&sid=199708ee9cae93446e893c475e07315c4895gxrqb&type=client https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/282173/1-s2.0-S221282711... So my point stands, we could see significant environmental improvements if we mandated standard glass bottle and container sizes. Something like: Food, Carbonated Liquid, Beer, Wine. Sizes: 150ml, 300ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1L, 1.5L, 2L.
  - katbyte 5y ago
    isn't that just because the externalized costs of plastic disposables are passed along to society and the environment rather then paid by the manufacturer/consumer?
    - kragen 5y ago
      It depends greatly on how you estimate those externalized costs. A plastic soft-drink bottle https://www.polisanhellas.com/products-pet-preform.html https://www.polisanhellas.com/products-pet-preform.html is about 30 grams of extremely chemically inert material, produced for a tiny energy cost from about 30 grams of crude oil, that goes to a landfill and stays there for, probably, millennia. So a single barrel of oil makes about 5,000 plastic bottles. Each bottle embodies about 1200 kJ of energy from oil that would otherwise have been burned. So whatever the externalized costs of drilling, refining, and shipping a barrel of oil are, it's about a five-thousandth of that. If you incinerate the bottle in the end, you get that saved-up energy back, at the risk of producing pollution from other things in the furnace. Of course, blow-molding the bottle takes energy; you have to heat those 30 g of plastic up to 125°, but that only takes about another 4.5 kJ per bottle. Another similar amount was spent to injection-mold the preform. The actual work of blowing is even less, under 0.1 kJ. Similarly for shipping, molding machine operation, machine maintenance, catalysts, and so on. (A potential hole in this analysis is that I don't really know the energy costs of the whole terephthalic acid synthesis and polymerization process. They can't be enormously higher than the cost of molding, but they might be a lot lower or a little higher.) Contrast that with washing a glass bottle. You can't really wash a 500-mℓ glass bottle with less than about a liter of water, and to sterilize it you need that water to be at least 60°, preferably more like 90°. Heating water from 25° to 60° takes 35 calories per gram; at 4.2 J/cal, that's 150 kJ. (I think in actual fact the energy to reuse a glass bottle is about an order of magnitude higher than this.) You also have to take into account the energy to make the glass bottle: you're heating 500 grams of raw materials (or maybe cullet) up past, typically, 1200°, which takes maybe 700 kJ, depending on the materials' specific heats and enthalpies of fusion. This gets amortized over the number of reuses of the bottle. What about disposal? Proper disposal of a 500-gram glass bottle uses 15 times as much landfill space as a 30-gram plastic bottle (just as it costs 15 times as much to ship) but in any case there is no shortage of landfill space, and neither type of bottle occupies an appreciable percentage of existing landfills. Improper disposal for glass bottles is much worse, as you know if you've ever stepped on a broken glass bottle underwater at the beach. Chemically, both materials are very inert and nontoxic. (Microplastics are almost entirely from washing synthetic fibers, not from plastic bottles.) So, making a plastic bottle takes on the order of 10 kJ of energy, while washing a glass bottle for reuse takes more like 150 kJ, and similarly shipping glass around externalizes 15× as much of each cost. Neither one has significant disposal externalities, except in the rare case of improper disposal, in which case broken glass is dangerous. The crucial question, then, is how you weight the raw-material extraction externalities for the plastic bottle, and whether you incinerate it; because if drilling, refining, and shipping oil is the most significant externality (oil spills, bribing Nigerian officials, arresting Native American protestors asserting a sovereign right to block the Keystone pipeline, US invasions of Iraq), then the plastic bottle is about 7× worse. Unless you incinerate it instead of burying it in a landfill, in which case suddenly its oil consumption drops to zero, making it much better again. On the other hand, if the most significant externality is something related to burning oil or other fuels, like global warming, washing the glass bottle is 15× worse than throwing it out and replacing it with a plastic bottle. Unless your hot-water heater is solar or geothermal. Then again, you can run a blow-molding plant on solar energy, too. (There are other questions of pollution; both glassmaking and PET-making can produce pollution, but it's not intrinsic to either process, so which process produces more pollution is largely a matter of how mismanaged it is. However, by virtue of dealing with 15× larger quantities of material, glassmaking is at a disadvantage here.)
  - chillwaves 5y ago
    If that is the case, then sure, do so. But no effort is being made. And in the case of disposables, they can be made to have less impact on the environment, in both production and decomposition stages.

flyinghamster 5y ago

Fifty years ago, soda was generally sold in returnable glass bottles, which would be trucked back to the bottling plant, sanitized, and reused. But that was too inconvenient, I guess. First came thin glass disposables, and then plastic took over. At least aluminum cans (and steel, for that matter) are readily recyclable. Coca-Cola bottles had their originating bottling plant stamped into the bottom.

AussieWog93 5y ago
>Fifty years ago, soda was generally sold in returnable glass bottles It still is in India (at least sometimes). I suspect rising labour costs killed this industry, though. Why take on a logistical challenge you don't have to?
YokoZar 5y ago
The energy and water costs of cleaning and sanitizing reusable containers can be very substantial. It seems nicer to "reuse" a bottle, but it may genuinely be the case that it's less impactful to just make a new one (preferably out of recycled materials).
- Factorium 5y ago
  Reusing glass uses a similar amount of water and about 30-40% of the energy as recycling: https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/282173/1-s2.0-S2212827119X00037/1-s2.0-S2212827119300563/main.pdf?X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEGYaCXVzLWVhc3QtMSJHMEUCIQD9Qifj%2BlAFsZaHwEiaKoA3zv5UflZP%2F4BNK3jIALQoGAIgGkZc5BpkVHV4IS3jwz9sMuUP36B9XEjLobdKWSz6CZEqgwQI7%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2FARAEGgwwNTkwMDM1NDY4NjUiDAI3FNMv4ehRiZvZFSrXA%2BFeSHFobACl2g3RpuUU8tV2joqS6YFOfeLkTAjk3fA27fw1xUxRQ5K1j3Hs8vreSFlnkzqHBTJNZREa2THJPH2FmiGQv5tisyuxZ1sa4afGr9DuWanL150YucFWosbQYZE7rCULmkbd5jR6h33vDidDiXqLw54lWWfpipQejif3xRMprEmnTTHqMKyyVBtqULoHozxGMNRoH30Bx%2BUC%2BeDc58erCTFUQ6%2Bm4ME7pv0IFoagkEPRWh98LXKom1VWHRJlc%2BlkPkmRsQf36A1vmb86wCTJbipblov1Hpw7TG55dPTBCxLd4iCk%2Be%2F5CG0F3KwREGYTHUR0biqbEUJ1RDL7eYI2QQi456ipz1%2FmmOiq4RLmW%2FxXuzVB5oP3V0nyCnB1OKY2sNPrroT9jRdWEGXvrY1VSM7MUSfyZWMEZTyAvIXEso13yCLSwgYouECIBmeRPvyMJwdULt3oJWoVmivd8XLZSfZ3Ao2OKat71vsE8NBdEGuxu%2BQx7G3gISIMWvhf4cFz2TWPX3%2FTN4OysV0F93EGjiZhTN4Q1lZdiaDP2m3x3F2nJk2nKRyJm6oB39sdBLwbMqiDdg4KO5xDVoDJvghxPKpKpq2T7XadNfUUcx%2BUJkX24jDS48WLBjqlAeGAf71T9iqXpOrWITZuQPt1IDKuxfUL8yVW3w4SIW0CYSiXpvUnYbT2r%2BUHxwsMmOKjOwOLUWFf55nxKVSG1TDUie9RjpwhZeuaQkdf1OAkJpTpWNAbSJ1b6is%2BUKylC%2BI%2BrUiZ1B6QhF7uhaHoyNw7NphWYxxUx232ipPNfxueYHW9poycQX6Z2ICzc9eEmx%2FVMzMS9HE0jz1KiDvPTDo7%2BZxhYA%3D%3D&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20211021T143323Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAQ3PHCVTYZJCEPNRI%2F20211021%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=2feaef3d8d919f6a9dbff539152b82dd7af3c32c48b4140d04f6a5ff5469fef7&hash=c9ed574805c993058ceedb73034497d92887c2d2e7c0e0b5cd0409722b0243c0&host=68042c943591013ac2b2430a89b270f6af2c76d8dfd086a07176afe7c76c2c61&pii=S2212827119300563&tid=spdf-ea611fa5-e074-40fb-9a29-5a384613d6b4&sid=199708ee9cae93446e893c475e07315c4895gxrqb&type=client https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/282173/1-s2.0-S221282711... So my point stands, we could see significant environmental improvements if we mandated standard glass bottle and container sizes. Something like: Food, Carbonated Liquid, Beer, Wine. Sizes: 150ml, 300ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1L, 1.5L, 2L.
- katbyte 5y ago
  isn't that just because the externalized costs of plastic disposables are passed along to society and the environment rather then paid by the manufacturer/consumer?
  - kragen 5y ago
    It depends greatly on how you estimate those externalized costs. A plastic soft-drink bottle https://www.polisanhellas.com/products-pet-preform.html https://www.polisanhellas.com/products-pet-preform.html is about 30 grams of extremely chemically inert material, produced for a tiny energy cost from about 30 grams of crude oil, that goes to a landfill and stays there for, probably, millennia. So a single barrel of oil makes about 5,000 plastic bottles. Each bottle embodies about 1200 kJ of energy from oil that would otherwise have been burned. So whatever the externalized costs of drilling, refining, and shipping a barrel of oil are, it's about a five-thousandth of that. If you incinerate the bottle in the end, you get that saved-up energy back, at the risk of producing pollution from other things in the furnace. Of course, blow-molding the bottle takes energy; you have to heat those 30 g of plastic up to 125°, but that only takes about another 4.5 kJ per bottle. Another similar amount was spent to injection-mold the preform. The actual work of blowing is even less, under 0.1 kJ. Similarly for shipping, molding machine operation, machine maintenance, catalysts, and so on. (A potential hole in this analysis is that I don't really know the energy costs of the whole terephthalic acid synthesis and polymerization process. They can't be enormously higher than the cost of molding, but they might be a lot lower or a little higher.) Contrast that with washing a glass bottle. You can't really wash a 500-mℓ glass bottle with less than about a liter of water, and to sterilize it you need that water to be at least 60°, preferably more like 90°. Heating water from 25° to 60° takes 35 calories per gram; at 4.2 J/cal, that's 150 kJ. (I think in actual fact the energy to reuse a glass bottle is about an order of magnitude higher than this.) You also have to take into account the energy to make the glass bottle: you're heating 500 grams of raw materials (or maybe cullet) up past, typically, 1200°, which takes maybe 700 kJ, depending on the materials' specific heats and enthalpies of fusion. This gets amortized over the number of reuses of the bottle. What about disposal? Proper disposal of a 500-gram glass bottle uses 15 times as much landfill space as a 30-gram plastic bottle (just as it costs 15 times as much to ship) but in any case there is no shortage of landfill space, and neither type of bottle occupies an appreciable percentage of existing landfills. Improper disposal for glass bottles is much worse, as you know if you've ever stepped on a broken glass bottle underwater at the beach. Chemically, both materials are very inert and nontoxic. (Microplastics are almost entirely from washing synthetic fibers, not from plastic bottles.) So, making a plastic bottle takes on the order of 10 kJ of energy, while washing a glass bottle for reuse takes more like 150 kJ, and similarly shipping glass around externalizes 15× as much of each cost. Neither one has significant disposal externalities, except in the rare case of improper disposal, in which case broken glass is dangerous. The crucial question, then, is how you weight the raw-material extraction externalities for the plastic bottle, and whether you incinerate it; because if drilling, refining, and shipping oil is the most significant externality (oil spills, bribing Nigerian officials, arresting Native American protestors asserting a sovereign right to block the Keystone pipeline, US invasions of Iraq), then the plastic bottle is about 7× worse. Unless you incinerate it instead of burying it in a landfill, in which case suddenly its oil consumption drops to zero, making it much better again. On the other hand, if the most significant externality is something related to burning oil or other fuels, like global warming, washing the glass bottle is 15× worse than throwing it out and replacing it with a plastic bottle. Unless your hot-water heater is solar or geothermal. Then again, you can run a blow-molding plant on solar energy, too. (There are other questions of pollution; both glassmaking and PET-making can produce pollution, but it's not intrinsic to either process, so which process produces more pollution is largely a matter of how mismanaged it is. However, by virtue of dealing with 15× larger quantities of material, glassmaking is at a disadvantage here.)
- chillwaves 5y ago
  If that is the case, then sure, do so. But no effort is being made. And in the case of disposables, they can be made to have less impact on the environment, in both production and decomposition stages.