bluefoxicy

Throw them in the streets and MUP paths, of course.

I got a bottle of water today to refill my water bottle (yeah I know, but I'm in an old building that's occasionally had water fountains taken down to test the lead content of the water). Poland Springs has, on their bottles, literature about how their new bottles are thinner (they're like shaped ziplock bags, honestly) and use 40% less material, and it's all "environmental" and stuff.

They should be using glass.

Better quality, thicker glass bottles are more expensive, by a few pennies (30 cent vs 50 cent). You can recollect them at distribution (dropping off beer? Soda? etc... put returned bottles on the delivery truck) and clean/sterilize/refill them. Many times. Melting down glass or plastic wastes too much energy.

To add insult to injury, all of this is irrelevant: my state doesn't have a bottle bill, at all. Glass bottles get broken in the streets where I bike; plastic bottles get scattered all around town, in the roads, sidewalks, parks, highways ... sometimes you can throw one and make it into a nearby trash can easily.

Environmentally conscious ... right, I ride my bike through this stuff. 5 cent deposit on all glass beer, wine, liquor, and soft beverage bottles would make a spill off my bike less fatal. Cans and plastic bottles couldn't hurt either, 5 cents. 10 cent for anything in reusable condition.

Why are these people even talking about how much "waste" a water bottle produces? It produces zero! Reuse it, recycle it, do something with it!

Bacciagalupe

A heavier bottle means you need to use more energy to get it from Point A to Point B. You can't win for losing.

The better solution, of course, is to add a little more public infrastructure (e.g. public water fountains) and to encourage people to carry reusable bottles.

Of course it'd also be better to drastically cut down on the number of commercially sold beverages, especially given how many of them are gussied-up sugar water, but that is highly unlikely to happen. All things considered, I'm not sure what more Poland Spring can do, since at this point people will still demand bottled water even if they went completely out of business.

bluefoxicy

No, adding public access to water isn't an answer. People buy beer, liquor, wine. Soda comes in plastic bottles, but there's broken glass all over the streets here. Do you want Vodka fountains everywhere, too?

The better solution is to have an infrastructure to recollect and reuse durable glass and plastic bottles, and to recycle unusable ones. Maryland, as a state, gave up on recycling; there used to be Trash, Paper, and Cans/Glass/Plastic pick-up days, with the recycling coming once or twice a month. That lasted for all of two years, and also accounted for 80% of my waste output.

I've never been much of an environmentalist because, frankly, you can't break the environment. What you can do is irritate me with trash everywhere and air I can't breath. More importantly, though, recycling and reuse are a huge economic boon: we are wasting resources manufacturing new bottles while dumping existing bottles in the landfill. We are wasting resources making new plastic and melting down glass ore when we have glass and plastic we could chemically and thermally melt. Why don't we just manufacture millions of boots and then burn them all while we're at it? How about digging holes and filling them back in?

If you have one perfectly good widget rolling off the assembly line while another perfectly good widget is rolling into the landfill, you are doing it wrong.

dougmc

Yes. Yes I do. And a pony too, if you please! (A pony that I can feed delicious vodka to!)

kabersch

You mean sand? That's what glass is made from. I believe it takes less energy to melt down used glass than it does to make it from scratch, but washing it is even cheaper. I don't think too many places wash used bottles any more. When I lived in Oregon there was a .05 deposit on all soda and water cans and bottles by law. To get the money back they have recycling machines at the grocery stores. You put the bottles and cans in them and they count them and give you a slip that says how much money you are owed. You take it into the store and they give you the cash. The machines also crush (and break) the bottles and cans as they count them. It was interesting.

As far as what riding through trash, I prefer plastic bottles thrown into the bike lane as opposed to glass. The plastic ones don't break and slice my tires. I would also be much happier if everybody recycled their glass and plastic. I put all mine in the big blue container and put it on the curb every week.

I hope it helped you to vent here.

Digital_Cowboy

I think that nowadays most grocery stores now have some sort of coin operated machine that people can pull up to and refill their water cooler bottles. I think that within reason that one can pretty much choose to fill just any size bottle.

Also at one of the LBS' that I go to they had a bag for sale that was made from reused "sippy" juice bags. I also seem to remember seeing a story about someone who was doing basically the same thing with those "T-Shirt" bags that "everyone" gets from the Walmart to the grocery store to 7-11 to the bloody pet store. Both are good ideas as supposedly they're "not" recyclable.

My question, is why aren't they recyclable?

Another good question, not too long ago I was given a Radio Shack/Trek water bottle that is labeled "biodegradable." How long will it last, or does it have to be buried or left in the sun for an extended amount of time before it starts to break down?

Booger1

To cure the problem:
Build your own Spiral Island.....

Dchiefransom

You don't get your deposit money back in California. They pay you by weight at any recycling facility.

The Human Car

+ 1



https://ecoble.com/2007/11/18/250000-...land-paradise/

kenji666

I remember as a kid taking the empty green glass Coke bottles back to the grocery store and getting money back. Just think about the energy to collect and transport these bottles back to the bottling plant.

Digital_Cowboy

Just think about the energy to collect the raw materials to make the glass, and to ship it to the plant, and than to make the bottles vs. the energy to collect the bottles, clean them and reuse them. Seems to me that overall reusing them saves more energy than it expands.

bluefoxicy

You mean like, the energy to load them back on the truck?

Look I have 5000 bottles of coke coming off the truck, and 4500 bottles in the store collected this month. Put these in the crates and go back to the factory.

kenji666

Bottling companies might disagree with your cost-benefit analysis.

Digital_Cowboy

But don't the trucks still have to go back to the warehouse/factory to pick up new bottles? And don't the old bottles have to be shipped somewhere? Doesn't it make sense to return them to the warehouse/factory and clean and reuse them? Rather than throwing them away?

bluefoxicy

It's an economic problem that can be solved. There's an up-front cost nobody wants to deal with, and the retail stores don't want to collect bottles.

A bottle bill basically requires the producers to put up the deposit (meaning, raise prices or eat the costs, 5 cents a bottle), while the consumers collect the bottles. The stores act as an intermediary.

Now, let's assume that reclaiming bottles and cleaning them saves the bottling company money over buying new bottles, yes? For the moment let's focus on that; I'll touch other issues later.

The bottling company still needs to put a deposit on the bottle, charge extra or eat costs. It has to hire people to clean the bottles. It has to hire people to track the accounting. It has to make procedural changes. Up-front costs, even though the eventual cost reduction is a net gain.

Consumers need to collect bottles and get money. Win.

Now, why in the hell would the retail outlets act as intermediaries to support this? Why do I want to hold your bottles for no reason? Wasting my space, taking my money, then I have to get it from that guy ... no.

So, the law would be a thing that sketches out an economic action, prodding businesses to form an overall advantageous economic machine; it would not, however, supply any such services. As little done by the government as possible, and little dictation. Just say, oh... the retail stores must accept bottles, pay deposits ... and the delivery trucks must take bottles and pay the deposits... down the line. Let the businesses figure it out.




Now, some bottles are unusable. Bottles also must be cleaned and sterilized. Unusable bottles must be disposed of, somehow.

At low volume, all of inspection, cleaning, and disposal are costly.

So, rather than doing all that, the bottling companies outsource to another company. This company only exists because, suddenly, there's an annoyingly inefficient process to be followed to inspect, clean, and sterilize bottles on a small scale. So a company appears and says, "Hey, we can manage all that, cut your costs, and we'll charge you oh ... 10 cents per bottle to do it." Now a bottle costs 25 cents, so that's a 15 cent savings over new bottles. On top of it, the whole management costs of employing people and keeping machinery running and disposing of bottles, and the risk of costly problems cropping up.

The inspection/cleaning companies, of course, get to keep the broken bottles. Since this is their business, they don't have to worry about adding overhead; so their disposal process, from the ground up, is "sell the massive amounts of broken glass to scrappers to use as raw glass for making new bottles." Double dipping: it's good for business.



The bottle producers, on the other hand, experience a dip in production. Sucks to be you. The fast ones will catch on and become bottle cleaners, so they produce new bottles and recycle the broken ones as refined material input to make new bottles.

By the way, glass is a ceramic. Just like metals, glass is complex: fine steel is not iron that's been melted down; glass is not sand that's been melted down. Good quality glass can take direct heating by fire to hundreds of degrees, then go directly into an ice bath. Repeatedly. It's also impact resistant, and under excessive force will chip rather than cracking. The properties of glass are highly dependent on both the manufacture method and the composition: green-tint lime glass is crap (but has a 1500 degree lower melting point), while purified silicon dioxide can be made into extremely high quality glass (but takes far more energy to form).

So, bottle producers are generally grateful for access to already refined glass. Bottle producers that become bottle washers are of course going to reap the benefits of keeping their volume high while lowering their production costs. Additionally, they won't have to pay for scrap glass to manufacture new bottles; that comes free. Note that the cost of melting down and producing a bottle from scrap glass is still high: you have to heat it to 3000-4500 degrees! Washing them is cheaper, so it encourages such combined producers to not just declare all bottles as unfit for reuse (they can't claim unfit and then resell them as new, either, as that would be fraudulent).



Now you've created jobs. One part of the industry dips; however, other parts have their burdens lowered and thus can operate more efficiently, allowing for greater profits and faster expansion (right, this won't help Pepsi or Coke). Still other entire markets are created.

You've also eliminated a system suffering from the Goldstein's Boots problem: you're making an object and throwing it directly into a landfill (or making boots and then burning them... digging holes and filling them in again... etc, just to waste economic activity). If you have a perfectly good bottle, and you throw it in the trash as another bottle rolls off the production line ... why, you could take that perfectly good bottle, use it, throw the brand new bottle right in the trash. This means you have economic activity devoted to creating things and immediately throwing them away.



Not to get too political, but this is a stark contrast to how foul-weather politicians generally try (and fail) to create jobs. They create "initiatives" to "stimulate the economy," which basically entail useless government work that does nothing in the end, but puts people in front of desks collecting a paycheck. This has a huge hidden cost.

To create jobs, you must create economic incentives that actually reduce waste or create something. When something is destroyed, society loses the value of it, whether it be a broken window or dying car; cars that last 20 years would sure slow down auto manufacturers and reduce the demand for cars, but society would prosper because of massive funds flowing everywhere else. Landfilling bottles that can be reused is also a way to remove the value of that object from society; at best it moves wealth (or a portion of remaining wealth) to the bottling companies. An extreme example: The Great Depression came as a result of Goldman Sachs doing something bad and getting a lot of the money in the economy shoved into its own coffers; made them rich and everyone else poor.



In short, bottling companies would benefit; bottle producers not so much, unless they were shrewd and diversified to become an outsource company for both new and refurbished bottles. If they overcharge for refurbs, then other outsource companies will appear to compete and sell back broken bottles as raw glass material to them. Overall, something stops vanishing from the economy, and society overall becomes more wealthy. More jobs, more flowing money, all other businesses experience an increase in prosperity, and thus everyone basically wins, some begrudgingly so due to annoying changes in paradigm.

Utopian societies don't exist because what's best for all of us prevents a few of us from getting fist fulls of cash. Forcing everyone to play nice is hard; while directly taking cash from the rich and giving it to the poor makes people not want to play your game anymore. This is an attempt to force people to play nice; they'll still try to do their money grabs, but we've put a limiter on how much damage they can directly do.

dedhed

Really, children need to learn from a young age about personal responsibility. When you're done with something you don't just throw your ***** in the street. Doesn't matter if it's recycled or reused. My kids know if they were to ever throw their empty stuff anywhere but where it belongs they'd get slapped pretty hard.
One of my pet peeves is finding a can back in the woods when I'm hunting. You managed to carry it in when it was full and weighed something, but you couldn't crush it and carry it out when it's empty? WTF! Usually bring back more cans than birds!

Digital_Cowboy

Let's not forget that besides the empty cans that one has a tendency to find while hunting, hiking, fishing, biking, etc. That there are the empty sandwich/candy wrappers, potato chip bags, etc.

As you said they brought them in when they contained something and was therefore heavier, but now that they're empty they for whatever reason cannot seem to carry them back out again.

kenji666

You forget who is driving the economic engine of the soft drink industry. It is certainly not the bottle (container) suppliers or the grocery store chains or even consumers. It is Pepsi and Coke. They decide what is in THEIR best financial interest (vis-a-vis quarterly 10-Q financial reports). They could care less about the environment or the energy consumption of their suppliers. They use their power to squeeze them into more and more price concessions. PET bottles don't use less material because it's better for the environment. They use less material because it is cheaper for the bottlers.

Digital_Cowboy

Yes, but as we've seen with a certain mega store. That not all of their business partners are willing to lower their standards to meet their lower standards of what they're willing to accept/sell.

If the customers and suppliers stood their ground they'd have to change their business model.