Bottle deposit systems are generally effective. In Sweden, 90-95% of the pet plastic in drink bottles makes it back to a factory to be used as raw material for new bottles. We don’t really recycle the hdpe lids or polyester labels, though.
That’s not actually a solution when talking single-use either. Remaking the bottles from recycled glass is incredibly energy intensive and not an environmentally friendly process either. Multi-use bottles are much better, but the cleaning required also isn’t that simple and also relatively energy intensive (far from remaking the bottles of course).
There’s also practical downsides to glass (heavy, breakable), but those are subjective and their relevance highly depends on the use case.
Ideally, we wouldn’t buy stuff to drink in any kind of bottle, but just use tap water. possibly just buy some concentrated stuff to then make your actual drink at home. Nothing beats the effectiveness of transporting water through a simple pipe, but that isn’t even possible everywhere in the world due to drinking water quality issues…
Good job with reading you did there. Your didn’t even make it 8 words in and already decided to comment. Maybe give it another go, if you dare, and try getting a little further this time.
We actually don’t have a pipeline to recycle plastic bottles though, right?
Bottle deposit systems are generally effective. In Sweden, 90-95% of the pet plastic in drink bottles makes it back to a factory to be used as raw material for new bottles. We don’t really recycle the hdpe lids or polyester labels, though.
Why aren’t we just using glass, as we did for decades just fine.
That’s not actually a solution when talking single-use either. Remaking the bottles from recycled glass is incredibly energy intensive and not an environmentally friendly process either. Multi-use bottles are much better, but the cleaning required also isn’t that simple and also relatively energy intensive (far from remaking the bottles of course).
There’s also practical downsides to glass (heavy, breakable), but those are subjective and their relevance highly depends on the use case.
Ideally, we wouldn’t buy stuff to drink in any kind of bottle, but just use tap water. possibly just buy some concentrated stuff to then make your actual drink at home. Nothing beats the effectiveness of transporting water through a simple pipe, but that isn’t even possible everywhere in the world due to drinking water quality issues…
A lot of glass bottles aren’t melted down, but simply washed and reused.
Good job with reading you did there. Your didn’t even make it 8 words in and already decided to comment. Maybe give it another go, if you dare, and try getting a little further this time.