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It's not at the scale of "Person holding a bottle of coke" that the packaging is inefficient, but at the scale of "Delivery truck holding a bottle of coke". If
by GauntletWizard 4y ago
It's not at the scale of "Person holding a bottle of coke" that the packaging is inefficient, but at the scale of "Delivery truck holding a bottle of coke". If we were washing and recycling glass bottles of coke like they used to do with Milk, it may be possible that the resulting efficiency would be better, but washing bottles to the same sanitary level is an energy-and-water intensive process; I am not so sure.
- SoftTalker 4y agoThey used to do exactly that with glass coke bottles. You'd buy your coke or whatever drink in glass bottles. You would pay a bottle deposit to encourage returns. You would take the empties back to the store, they would get picked up by the bottler, who would truck them back to the plant where they would get washed and sterilized and refilled. The glass bottles were heavy. The energy needed to truck them back and forth, and to clean and santize them was substantial. Most of that went away with plastic bottles. Aluminum cans have similar benefits, and replaced the steel cans that predated them. But plastic is cheaper than aluminum, or even steel.