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by jdietrich
1032 days ago
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Plastic bottles are more environmentally friendly. Glass requires massively more energy to manufacture, even using 100% recycled glass. Glass is heavy, so it's more expensive to transport. Collecting and washing bottles for re-use consumes a substantial amount of energy, which greatly increases the number of trips required to break even on the higher manufacturing impacts. The lifespan of a re-usable glass bottle is relatively very short, because glass is fragile. Glass compares poorly to HDPE when we factor in a realistic lifespan for glass and a realistic recycling rate for HDPE. |
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Minimising the transport costs is part of the design of the reuse process. Milk floats are a great example of this. Milk delivered to the door by an electrical vehicle daily and empties collected by the same vehicle, washed and refilled. This was the standard way to get milk (and often juice, eggs, etc) in my childhood but nowadays people throw a plastic bottle into a generic recycling stream every time and I highly doubt it's an improvement.
Online grocery shopping reduces fuel usage and pollution for getting goods to homes by consolidating many deliveries in one vehicle round. It would be great to see this being used (again) as a way of improving packaging efficiency too, one way or another.