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But the much greater weight increases fuel and green house gas emissions, they must be washed with energy intensive hot water, and are more prone to breakage an
by nytesky 3y ago
But the much greater weight increases fuel and green house gas emissions, they must be washed with energy intensive hot water, and are more prone to breakage and thus waste. It maybe the answer but not obvious.
- gruez 3y agoThat's why I reject policy prescriptions in the form of "we should replace x with y" and favor taxing negative externalities (eg. litter or carbon emissions) and letting the market figure out what's the most efficient solution.
- kardos 3y ago> the much greater weight increases fuel This may be technically correct, but is it significant? The difference in weight from glass bottles vs plastic bottles is surely nonzero but how does it compare to the weight of the truck moving it? > energy intensive hot water You can recover a lot of that heat with a heat exchanger
- elric 3y agoI've long wondered about this myself. Making plastic is pretty energy intensive, but so is making glass. The former mostly comes from new fossil fuels (sometimes with some recycled content), while the latter is mostly sand and is very often recycled. Discarded plastic, while hard to recycle, can be burnt for energy, while discarded glass bottles can either be washed & reused, or melted down a recycled. Glass bottles are more than an order of magnitude heavier than plastic bottles. This does seem pretty significant. It would be interesting to see a full lifecycle analysis of both options.
- WithinReason 3y agowashing replaces making the bottle from scratch, surely it's still less energy