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We still have medical cocaine. It makes sense to have a company who has long term experience processing it to still do the same as long as they keep up the proper permits and labs.
Set this aside and I agree with @reddig33@lemmy.world that i have much less worry about this than i do about all the plastic. I truly wish we could and would move back to glass bottles because those can truly be recycled. Plastic CAN be but most places anymore don't actually recycle it.
I read recently that recycled plastics make better railroad ties than wood does. You’d think someone would jump on that.
You have wood railroad ties? You mean the bars under the rails?
Yes. And they are usually treated with creosote. Which is why you should never use them in a vegetable garden.
We still don’t have high speed rail in the US.
Why? Do cars ride on railroad tracks now? (Yes, I am dimly aware there are also places outside the US.)
Always have? 🌎 🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
I'd expect them to stay sane and use prestressed concrete ones like the rest of the industry. Steel might make sense in some situations.
Do you mean the sleepers?
The US and Canada apparently wanted to be special, again.
My worry with changing bottles is whether or not anyone has looked into the difference in shipping pollution vs the plastic pollution. It could end up being no better in the long run. I would think glass would be better for sure if the shipping is electric, since the power itself can be regulated more tightly. But with fossil fuels, I have no idea where it would end up.
Once upon a time Coca cola used to sell coke in glass bottles that you would then give back to them, they'd wash them, sanitize them and sell them again. You'd pay a small deposit on the bottle that they'd then give back to you. They had bottling centers all over the place.
They switched to plastic bottles because it was much cheaper to let the government handle the garbage problem
I remember lol. Back when I was a kid there weren't plastic bottles in most places. I can't recall exactly when glass started going away, but you could still find some drinks in both as recently as the mid nineties.
The glass also needs more energy to be shaped.
In EU we optionally have returnable plastic bottles for coca cola, which will be reused until worn down.
I'm not sure how it would even make sense to have globally centralised bottling.
Luckily Wikipedia keeps a page on this, and I see there are almost twenty bottling plants in the US alone. Another industry blogger breathlessly reports that coke has 900+ bottling and syrup plants across the globe.
To your point I'm sure some glass bottles get shipped internationally, but it doesn't appear to be their M.O. They keep a few syrup plants across the globe and many bottling plants and distribution partners who work more locally, so the weight of their shipping media for the beverage is likely to be fairly well optimised.
Switching to glass across the globe would be a task for local bottlers and distributors, and although it might pose some challenges it'd be worth it imo
I didn't figure it would be centralized. It isn't currently, as you noted. There's a bottling plant for sodas a few towns away from me.
But the trip from bottling plant to store takes fuel. So do trips from recycling centers (or bottle return places) back to whatever destination they would go to.
Plastic is lighter than glass. It can be compacted more than glass too. So you can end up using less fuel to move an equivalent volume of plastic than glass. It's like packing your trunk full of styrofoam versus full of rocks. Trucks, rail cars, they can only hold a given volume. If a trip is heavier at a given volume, it takes more fuel to get it where it's going. Doesn't matter if it's going a block, a mile, or a state away, a heavier load takes more energy.
If the difference in energy used to transport glass produces more pollution than the plastic itself, that's an issue that has to be addressed, or switching is pointless. And that's before trying to figure out if manufacturing and recycling glass is definitely less of a problem than making and reusing/recycling plastic. I'm pretty sure it is cleaner to cycle glass than plastic. Kinda has to be.
But we're still heavily using fossil fuels for transport. Diesel in specific. That's a shit ton of exhaust spread across vehicles that may or may not be kept at best condition for environmental safety. Even with electric, are the tires of the trucks going to end up being an increase in pollution by carrying the heavier freight? They're already a damn big contributor to micro plastics.
We might end off breaking even in terms of environmental impact, which means we'd have to find ways to shift that balance, or the resources spent in changing back to glass would be a waste.
It's easy to look at glass and say that because it's technically infinitely recyclable, that it's going to be better than plastic. And it may well be. But it isn't just recycling that's the problem.
Hell, glass bottles being returned and reused comes with its own issues with water usage and waste water disposal.
I've never seen anything that covers all the factors in one place. It might be out there and my casual level of interest in the details of it haven't dug it up, I dunno. But it seems like a good idea to make a solid plan before jumping into things.
As far as I understand it comes down to recycling rates: In countries like Germany where there's mandatory deposit on one-use plastic bottles it's a definitive win, in other places the situation isn't as clear-cut. PET bottles can be recycled very well provided you have a clean recycling stream, which the deposit ensures.
Still, beer in plastic bottles is a travesty, it's generally deposit glass bottles over here (some brewery-specific, many many many generic though the crates tend to be specific). Cans at least won't spoil the beer, but are also more annoying deposit-wise as you have to take care to not crush them in the wrong way or the machine won't be able to read the code.
Side note: Apparently our whole traditional glass recycling is cooked, too much stuff that shouldn't be in there in there that spoils whole batches. And very difficult to educate people about it or filter things out automatically, sure, ceramics can be filtered out, but drinking glasses of the wrong type of glass messing up the whole chemistry? Forget it. The good news is that crushed glass makes excellent aggregate, I've even heard of some places using it to top up beaches.
Glass vs plastic has two issues, glass costs more to ship because it weighs many times what glass does and glass comes with increased rates of injury from broken glass. Cans are the best solution.
Cans are still flawed. The inside is coated in plastic as well, so while the aluminum is recyclable, and indeed frequently recycled, the plastic inside is not.
True but that does burn off during recycling so while it is not perfect they are better than glass or plastic from a carbon footprint POV.