this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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I think it's worth pointing out here that there are some major downsides to glass.
Weight. Glass is heavy, more weight means more energy (and emissions) required to transport it, and a lower product mass to packaging mass ratio.
Durability. Glass bottles have to be much thicker than plastic bottles to achieve the same strength, which means thicker glass and/or additional packaging is required to get the product to the consumer.
It would be interesting to see the total life cycle emissions for packaging types, and to figure out how many re-uses (if any) are required for a glass bottle to offset its pollution footprint compared to a disposable vs recycled plastic bottle.
I can't really advocate for plastic/aluminum/glass packaging, since I'm not aware of a study the considers the total footprint for each.
Ideally, we'd purchase our own containers, and then fill our own containers from a local bulk supply. Minimizing the weight and distance traveled while maximizing re-use is key.
The ideal solution you propose was often used when we used glass.
The only reason we could have started throwing our containers is because plastic is so much cheaper.
To be fair, when we used glass, fewer product were transported long distance.
Nowadays we can do like Germany who incentives to bring back bottles for recycling.
Or an even better alternative would be to use glass for individuals and another method for transportation.
Although i've seen some bio stores starting to refill plastic containers, wich isn't perfect but a nice middle ground to start changing habits.
We should also switch away from liquid based detergents. My partner gets liquid dishwasher detergent, and it bugs me a bit because we're paying extra money, and buying extra plastic, just to ship a dilute version of the powder that I'd rather buy.
I agree with all of your points, but the original picture was showing plastic pollution and you went on to compare it with carbon emissions. So when you use a phrase like "total footprint" it's difficult to interpret that any other way than we must make one problem worse to solve the other.
I don't see why we can't have solutions that are low/zero carbon AND don't result in plastic being dumped in the ocean.
Is the goal to reduce plastic, or is the goal to live as long and sustainably as possible on the only known rock that can support human life?
But I see it as two sides of the same coin. Plastic or glass, we're not getting at the core problem, which is long distance, packaging intensive transportation of goods. Plastic is bad because it becomes trash, and eventually a pollutant. Glass may have less pollution in the product, but more pollution in the distribution.
Again, I agree. Rather than blindly reducing energy usage and/or reducing plastic pollution we should be looking towards any solution that works towards holistic sustainable living across the planet.
The only statement that I would debate is: "Glass may have less pollution in the product, but more pollution in the distribution."
The pollution in the distribution is currently carbon based output from fossil fuels, but it doesn't have to be. Also, the glass can be efficiently re-used in some cases. In the UK we used to have milk distributed in glass bottles, delivered by people on electric "milk floats", who collected the empties as they delivered the full ones every day. The bottles didn't get melted down, just washed and refilled. It seems possible to me that we could get that process to almost zero carbon whilst also using zero plastic.
That's one example, but a single holistic solution to both carbon output and low waste is probably not possible. To achieve the global sustainability that we all want will take different and innovative solutions in each use case.
I guess the OP's meme makes sense in some cases and not others, depending on perspective.