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But a glass bottle weighs 10x what a plastic bottle does, resulting in significantly more fuel usage and greenhouse emissions. PET bottles are widely recycled,
by redwall_hp 2y ago
But a glass bottle weighs 10x what a plastic bottle does, resulting in significantly more fuel usage and greenhouse emissions.
PET bottles are widely recycled, at something like 90% in Norway and 80% in Japan. Versus 25-30% in the US. The issue in the US is literally that people just throw them in the trash or on the side of the road, outside of the six states that have a deposit.
Statista link, with some of the rough figures corroborated by Wikipedia:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1166550/plastic-bottle-recycling-rates-in-select-countries/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1166550/plastic-bottle-r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PET_bottle_recycling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PET_bottle_recycling
The issue is the lack of will, and opposition, to actually put them in a place where the materials can be recycled...and to make it cheaper (through tax incentives) to recycle the material than to use new plastic.
Those glass bottles would end up in the trash or in the road too, as things stand. It's where I already see them go most of the time. Moving from a recycling-friendly state to a southern state has been infuriating in that regard.
- DoingIsLearning 2y ago> more fuel usage and greenhouse emissions Again coca-cola can make the full logistical operation EV based (bar maritime) and offset with deploying renewables. If they care. Glass can be either washed (even more energy saving) or fully recycled, all the time, 100% of the time. PET : - can only be recyclable a few N cycles and becomes increasingly brittle when recycled. - There is no such thing as transparent recycled PET Those are the two core reasons why none of the major manufacturers actually use recycled PET or use it fractionally (10 to 30% PET, which marketing will spin with 'using (some) plastic from 100% recycled materials') The sad story about the economics of this is that recycled PET is not nearly good quality enough to be used for packaging leading to it being used in plastic poles or road substrates and further contributing to microplastics in the waterways. It's a scam through and through.