The problem isn’t just plastic, it’s the long supply chains. Let’s take juice bottles, you stop using plastic, what do you use? Single use glass isn’t good either, it takes a lot of energy to recycle it, way more than plastic (not that we are actually able to recycle plastic), metal cans are probably a bit better but they also have their energy costs. Reusable glass is the best, but it still has to be moved by heavy truck back and forth from the bottling plant.
Nah… We tried that. It wasn’t practical. All shops were required to collect glass bottles from customers. You then had to transport them to cleaning facilities. Before transporting them to the breweries. Then back to the stores. And you had to have special crates for transporting the bottles. Since the number of bottles received wasn’t the same as the number of bottles sold, you also had to distribute those crates between stores.
Here we ended up recycling all the plastic and aluminium bottles. They are shredded in the store to make transport efficient. Then transported to the recycling facility. Here about 90% of all bottles are recycled.
The problem isn’t just plastic, it’s the long supply chains. Let’s take juice bottles, you stop using plastic, what do you use? Single use glass isn’t good either, it takes a lot of energy to recycle it, way more than plastic (not that we are actually able to recycle plastic), metal cans are probably a bit better but they also have their energy costs. Reusable glass is the best, but it still has to be moved by heavy truck back and forth from the bottling plant.
We need to start rethinking distribution.
You should reuse glass bottles first, not recycle them after 1 use.
Nah… We tried that. It wasn’t practical. All shops were required to collect glass bottles from customers. You then had to transport them to cleaning facilities. Before transporting them to the breweries. Then back to the stores. And you had to have special crates for transporting the bottles. Since the number of bottles received wasn’t the same as the number of bottles sold, you also had to distribute those crates between stores.
Here we ended up recycling all the plastic and aluminium bottles. They are shredded in the store to make transport efficient. Then transported to the recycling facility. Here about 90% of all bottles are recycled.
You clearly didn’t read all of my comment before replying