Here I was thinking I was the only one that had the same thoughts about the bottle, everyone around doesn't care and just places them in the recycling bin, and Glass is annoying as some just buy the product for the container.
Europe would like to remind you, you can have a system across a continent that reuses glass and plastic. The system is two-fold: *bars get crates of glass bottles and hand back crates of empty bottles. *supermarkets tax people when they buy bottles, be it glass or plastic (like beer bottles). you get your tax back when you deposit them back at a store which sells that brand of product. it is in the form of a discount slip for the next time you buy something at the supermarket chain you deposited them at.
we have that here in ny. it’s not on everything just milk and dairy products. we buy and keep the bottles to reuse as drinking glasses and flower vases. they tax about $2 and give it back once you return it to the farm
They used to do this in the UK. The pop man (at least, where I'm from) would drop off fizzy drinks like the willy wonka milk man. Also shops took returns too. They don't do that now. There are glass milk bottles again now though, I wonder what the overall effect of that rinse and return scheme is, whether it's worth going back to that from plastic. Also the bottles are way smaller than the big milk things I get. I also get milk from a farm 3 miles away in those plastic bottles (and icecream) so... that's a big thing too.
ugh yes nothing like being a student, hosting a party and hogging the recycling machine for a good hour the next day so you can buy groceries for the week
@@maritrndal815 i can't tell if this is sarcastic. i'll assume it is. the machines can take bottles by the crate (for decades now). so if you drink 3 crates in a night, just put 3 empty crates in. done in 30 seconds.
Yes Crash Course environmental studies!!! Political implications, future stuff that still aren't common but will change the world, different methods of recycling around the world, what we personally can do, what big companies need to do etc. For instance in Norway most of the plastic we find on our beaches do not come from Norway because we recycle pretty well (could always be better!).
Actually not true. A LOT of the waste is from fish farms, fisheries and maritime use, and also from land-based activities - all from Norway. I've been part of several clean up projects where we sent the collected thrash to be analyzed for the origins. On the west coast, most of the plastic found is "local". If we add in micro plastics and nano plastics, that originates mostly from traffic, and it is much harder to see (and clean up). Yes, we recycle more, but not enough. Far from.
@@thomasr7129 hey! I realised I didn't get spesific enough, when I wrote the post I was thinking of plastic bottles spesifically! You are definitely right in the fact we aren't doing enough! :)
@@Norwaycat91 - Plastic bottles are refunded in Norway, and with the new increase in deposit, maybe even more people make sure that they are recycled. Such arrangements - where you have to pay a deposit fee that is refunded when you hand in the old / empty / used product, should be more widespread. There's also work in progress on increasing the number of "refund centers" where they take in the waste and handle it. Many harbors have such facilities for plastic waste and discarded fishing gear.
When what you're doing is selling basically the same sugar water, you need to advertise the feeling of the product - with a cleverly designed bottle - whose shape is designed specifically to make it look like you;'re getting more than what you paid for...
well, it's kinda a two-way street. if consumers would only decide based on the product itself, companies would compete on that instead of packaging or whatever. you always have to take your own actions into account as well, since that is basically what marketers do on a societal level
@@HankaAAR way less then melting silicate sand into glass. Lot of recycled glass is used into new glass making as it makes melting sand easier. And also you can do it forever without material loss, plastic at some point is just trash. Recycle is about more then just one time getting it back. Also I love how Hank is ok, with piles of trash, as he leaves in a country were space is abandon. Not every place on earth has enough space that is no nature enough that we can use it to dump infinite trash forever.
Glass is much better, if you use it right. Modern culture is not much for reusing stuff, so then glass becomes bad. But saving glass jars to use for storing stuff is the ideal state or returning them. In the Danish return system glass is used a lot, by actually reusing the glass bottle, but then you have to make sure people return the glass bottles to the stores.
In my two sense this debate shows how complicated environmental issues are, and the correct solution depends on what you care about. Plastic, even if recycled, is often downcycled meaning it will still end up in the landfill after a few reuses. So, if you're concerned with a lack of landfill space or plastic pollution then glass is a better option. The other side of that it carbon footprint of course (which plastics are produced from petroleum so if we want to completely stop taking out fossil fuels we will have to stop using plastic). Given that most manufacturing processes today use fossil fuels, it's clearly a larger carbon footprint to use glass. However, if everything was powered by renewables, then glass would likely be preferable from a carbon footprint standpoint. Of course more energy needed means more metals to be mined to produce solar panels, etc. So basically there is no best option, only better options depending on which aspect you care about. My advice is to do your best to use what you already have and reuse what is inevitable for you to buy.
Charles Nielsen Avalon Dairy where I live reuses their milk bottles. You can see a year on the bottle and imagine how many times the bottle has been reused. They charge a $1 deposit to encourage people to return them. I choose to buy it even though it is more expensive. But I feel it hits my “ buy local” and “low waste” buttons. Also their chocolate milk it the best.
i study material science of glass and ceramic and yeah, glass does take a lot of energy to recycle, but not nearly as much, as making new glass does. The amorph state of the glass lets it melt at way cooler temperatures, than the kristaline minerals you use to make it in the first place. so please definitly recycle your glass! be sure not to mix regular glass with high temperature resistant glass like oven doors, lab-glass etc or your grandmas old lead glass. i can see that being a huge problem with recycling, but since i dont work in recycling im actually not too sure whether thats a much of a problem at all. that said reusing or not purchasing any pakaging is of course the best solution. in germany you pay a few cents for most glass bottles, and when you return them you get that money back and they get reused over and over.
HolyGrayle Just out of curiosity, how do you ensure the bacteria doesn’t spread and endanger plastics in use across the world. Are the environmental conditions for these bacteria specific enough that they won’t be able to propagate?
@@Empyreal81 Since we have microplastics in every environment, I'm not sure we'd want to keep these bacteria from spreading? If plastic "rotted" like wood does we'd just end up treating it like wood.
I'm an intern at a packaging design firm. "Your bottles are going to look like other people's bottles. Compete on the product." totally resonated with me. I see these old designers making these needlessly complicated designs and not taking into consideration how wall thicknesses, color, and material affect our planet and our future.
(1) Reduce (2) Reuse (3) Recycle It's not just a set of good things to do, it's also an order of operations. Before you decide to recycle/bin something, ask whether you can reuse/repurpose it. Before you acquire something that you could reuse/recycle, ask yourself whether you can avoid acquiring it in the first place.
I feel like a beer company used to make beer bottles to be reused as building bricks which I thought was really awesome. Plus they were rectangular which seems good for shipping.
@@jedigecko06 I think plain packaging for tobacco is more about decreasing brand power over potentially vulnerable consumers over making recycling a more seamless process so we don't destroy this planet as quickly.
If all transport was run of renewables and all bottles was made of glass (which can be recycled using renewables) there would be no need to impose regulation on bottle shape and size. Improve dont impose
great video! one detail: this aluminium can is containing a "hidden" plastic bottle inside (the inner layer) so that the alu is not reacting with the content of the can.
i was under the impression that plastic bottles were NOT turned back into other bottles; that they were turned into lower quality plastics such as truck beds, plastic outdoor furniture, or plastic filling
Hank seems to be making a lot of very unfounded statements. Like glass is somehow worse than plastic. Glass is far more recyclable as long as types are separated.
Thraxarious Tailchaser Glass CAN be recycled but rarely is. As Hank said, it is a very energy intense process to recycle glass, and because glass is so heavy, it is very expensive to transport as well. Many places that accept glass for recycling sell it for other purposes, such as aggregate, rather than melting it down and forming new glass products. Glass gets an A+ if it gets reused, but is a huge hog on resources to recycle.
@@rrg419 glass is still easier to recycle than it is to make from raw materials. Which Hank points out is why we recycle plastic. Glass imo is a much better material than plastic it's more reusable, if it does get trashed it gets eroded without damaging the environment and it can be recycled. Look at milk cartons. There is no reason not to go for glass bottle milk, you return the bottle they clean it and put more milk in it the only waste is the foil recyclable top, if it gets broken it gets recycled but over its life that glass milk bottle has saved making 50 plastic cartons. Sure you could recycle all the milk cartons but that's inefficient and has a way worse carbon footprint. The tenets of reduce reuse recycle are in order of importance recycle is really the least importantant step but 'buy less crap' doesn't exactly sell to consumers.
I think he mentioned downgraded plastic later. It can be made into new bottles, but isn't as easy to do as aluminum. It does get downgraded a lot, into items that can't be easily recycled again, like clothing or carpet.
I think HDPE like from milk jugs (#2) is more commonly made into the products your describing. And #5 plastics are made into some of those products, too. I think #1 plastic is recycled into polyester a lot of the time.
Back to when I was a kid and glass bottles with deposits were common, the quart glass bottles had aluminum caps with a built-in tamper ring. When you unscrewed the cap several compressed tabs around the base of the cap were forced open by a lip on the bottle. They were as easy if not easier than the plastic caps. One more reason why returnable glass bottles "back in the day" were better.
An example: images.app.goo.gl/Frg41HGHsfeq2AE89 The caps were screwed onto the bottle, then a machine crimped the bottom of the cap, pressing the aluminum under a glass lip. The base of the cap was several tabs around the circumference, and the tabs were perforated. When you unscrewed the cap the glass lip forced the tabs apart. You could hear the tabs snapping apart from each other. It was a reliable and ingenious little product quality device, letting you know that no one had opened the bottle and let out the fizz...and it left nothing behind on the bottle! Plastic lids could do the same, but would require a more complicated machine to apply. The genius of the plastic caps is that they are installed as they are, as a one-way screw on cap. Quite brilliant on their own, albeit wasteful.
In Germany we still have those, including the returnable glass bottles. I'm not sure how much work it is to clean them up, but I'm pretty sure it's less resources than recycling or producing new. So I do not really agree with the "glass is terrible" sentiment
@@JJ-cc2eh Pretty sure it's cheaper and less resource intensive to create new glass than recycle it if you aren't factoring in something like a tax incentive. Since glass is already dirt cheap, all you're really doing when you recycle it is add extra steps to the manufacturing process. I think reusable bottles (I always forget if it's pop-tops or twist-offs, but I assume it's the pop-tops) are the exception, though.
@@JJ-cc2eh The returnable bottles of that time were very sturdy. That could also mean shipping is a matter coz of weight. With the modern automation afoot nowadays I could picture a machine that accepts and washes returning bottles that also fills and caps them on the spot. Think Soda Stream but on a scale, and with a more efficient carbonation source. Just connect water and power and off you go.
Really, the touch-screen self-serve fountains have us almost all the way there. Just add the bottle management function and let it run from there. Humans would have to maintain with syrup, bottle resupply, etc. All very solvable problems.
Claudia Jenrich might be better to stop buying Soda, nutritionally they have zero value and they have a huge carbon footprint. If you learn to drink water or juice your own fruit, you save a ton of money and also help the planet. Or if you super need soda you could use a reusable container and soda dispensers. :)
@@soupsgord That definitely would be the best option. Reusable bottles/cups etc are awesome! I own some. Where I live we don't have soda dispensers though - I've never seen one outside a restaurant anyway. However, I don't buy soda a lot anyway these days. Little steps :)
Ever seen the system in The Netherlands? They have standard bottles for lots of thing (less now than in the past though), and lots of things come in those. You bring them back to any store, get some cash back, and the bottles get cleaned and refilled. When we were children we were so impressed by that system when on vacation there. In Belgium, glass has been recycled by the government for as long as I remember. An official video can be found on vimeo.com/122509881 by the way. General information on www.fostplus.be/en/sorting-recycling/all-about-recycling/recycling-glass Hope you enjoy that information :)
Same idea in south america. You can look at a rack of sodas and see 3-4 generations of the same volume glass bottle with identical contents, all scuffed a little more/less.
In Dutch we call it "statiegeld", which sounds a lot less cool, but does have the similar benefit that people tend to return their (glass) beerbottles and the plastic crates they come in, all for reuse
1. FYI for anyone in the comments, at least in DC, you're supposed to leave the plastic bottle caps on the bottle when recycling them! Caps by themselves are too small and get lost in the machinery. Always check your local govt website to see what you can and cannot recycle, and how to responsibly dispose of items. 2. Hank, you said "glass is so impossible/so hard to recycle". From what I understand, glass is 100% recyclable and doesn't degrade in quality (unlike plastic) - are you just referring to a large carbon load in glass recycling since it has to be heated up so much? What's your source on this? 3. IBM research just invented a new PET recycling process that handles colored plastic called VOLCAT which is pretty cool! look it up if u wanna i'm pretty passionate about waste and recycling and the government regulation and economic and environmental impacts of it so i am DEEPLY interested in where you got your opinions from! (also if you ever need a researcher/writer for crash course environmental studies let me know :) )
100% agree. Everyone should check their local regulations, for example where I live caps should only be left on if they have the same plastic number as the bottle. Most don't so they should be left off & recycled separately if they have their own recycling number or put into the trash :( if they don't have a number.
I recently came back from a trip. I don't remember where it was (I think it was Greece?) but the water bottles there had the tamper-proof cap seal be broken _horizontally_ instead of vertically. Instead of leaving a ring at the bottom, the ring remained attached to the top and instead cricked open into 3 parts (that is, 3 slits appeared on the side) which could then separate and slide up. Still tamper-proof, but also the entire cap stayed in one piece. It was an amazing design.
I think the moment i read somewhere that switching all plastic products to metal or glass would actually make things worse for the planet (manufacturing and travel processes, etc) was the moment I fully comprehended there was no simple answer. We can't just buy fancier products or revert to a simpler time, there's no zero waste movement I can join to completely eliminate my impact. We hsve to change the structure of how things are made, moved, and consumed. It simultaneously makes me feel more and less guilty/stressed
One thing some places do to get more people to recycle is including a deposit in the purchase. In Alberta where I live any beverage bottle under a litre, you pay a 10 cent deposit for, over a litre 25 cents. You get the deposits back when you recycle the bottles at a depo. In addition to the deposit, we also pay an Eco Fee which offsets the cost of the recycling and deposit program. I can tell you from my experience that every beverage bottle I encounter gets recycled. Bottle litter is picked up by everyone from seniors, children doing fundraisers, to homeless people. I don't know how well the program works by the numbers but from an average Joe's perspective, it seems to work really well.
A local dairy here uses Glass bottles for their Milks. They charge a $1 deposit per bottle and you bring them back to the dairy and they have sterilize them all and re-use them. the only waste is a small plastic pop-off lid. But they use a Biodegradable plastic based off sugar-cane. and even better, their Chocolate milk is amazing!
Another problem with non biodegradable polymers is that small strands of the stuff (after a bottle has be decomposed by sun) are going to get everywhere and last for a long long time. Basically, by trowing away polymer products we are filling the global ecosystem with molecules it can do nothing about, some of which are harmful, some of which we don't know the effects of. That is not a wise think to do, one would say.
While biodegradable polymers are a good idea in theory, one of the biggest problems with the currently developed ones is that they usually need to be in specific conditions to degrade properly (something usually not found in a landfill setting or nature). The other issue is that because they are made of special polymers, they can't be recycled with other plastics and are inherently less stable to recycle. The real solution here is to avoid throwing away plastics in the first place and only using plastics that can be easily recycled.
Why not just ban plastics for all non necesery uses (for packaging, consumer electronics etc) it is usualy just a cheaper alternative but we are paying a much greater cost that is not measured by money
As a kid growing up in the 70s and 80s I remember taking our glass soda bottles back to the grocery store for Discount I'm purchasing a new eight pack of sodas. I assume they went back to the bottlers were washed refill the product recapped and shipped back out to the grocery stores again.
@@jedigecko06 it's not just glass recycling that's single-stream -- in most (all?) places in America, all recycling is single-stream unless you take it to a recycling center yourself.
People are recommending Crash Course Environmental Studies, and I think this hypothetical series needs all the unfiltered cursing kept in. Children need to understand that there's a time and place for profanity, and this is definitely one of those instances.
If only there were people filling bottles with LSD. 😂 Maybe a boomer will drink it and realize they're projecting their own entitlement onto children, while they donate their inheritance to charities in the most competitive job market in recent history.
I agree with removing unnecessary bumps and colorations and making the rings easier to remove, but I think thicker plastic can have a value in reuseability. The water in my house had a problem last summer and we had to buy a 40 pack of bottled water at the grocery store to drink, and all those bottles were really thin and efficient, but they also all went straight into the recycling because they were so fragile. I bought a bottle of dasani water out of a vending machine on my first day of classes last September, carried it around in my backpack 4 days a week, and didn't recycle it until I was moving out of my dorm in May, and it was still as structurally sound as it was the day I bought it. That one bottle may have used more plastic, but I used a lot less plastic than I would have if I'd had to buy a new bottle every week.
Our glass collection containers seperate into clear (white), green and brown (and presumably all other glass goes in there as well). Afaik seperating glass shards by colour with a sensor is fairly easy, would assume it's the same for PET plastic. So in theory they can just use the old green bottles to make green bottles again. But glass is pretty... It's also way more sturdy than those flimsy plastic bottles or aluminium cans. And thus great for reusing. We have a glass bottle deposit system here, so each bottle gets reused up to 50 times before being recycled. (although since glass is heavy it's best used for local products that don't have to travel far) Oh yeah, those re-use bottles are also standardised. Some companies have their own special ones, which still get reused (glass and thick plastic), it just makes it more of a hassle to return them in the right shops. I love that a lot of musicians have taken to making their CD cases paper :D
I mean we could do both? Or reuse plastic. If you make the bottles a bit thicker they can be refilled (10 times or more? can't find exact numbers, but something like that). Which afaik requires less energy than recycling them every single time, and ofc also increases the whole lifecycle of the plastic, cause every time you melt it again the quality drops a little.
I was thinking of whether it would be feasible to shift to a raw product approach where the vendor buys the drink in bulk and people bring their reusable bottles to fill them.
@@oftinuvielskin9020 That would probably be difficult with carbonated drinks. But with other stuff that usually comes in plastic like liquid shampoos or dry foods that could work. My student co-op buys rice and pasta and lentils and nuts in bulk, and then we can bring our own jars to fill and pay by weight. People with allergies and celiac disease would still need access to plastic packaged products to prevent contamination so they don't get sick, but for most people, dry foods could go into re-usable packaging.
@@SomeoneBeginingWithI Isn't that kind of how it used to be with glass bottle soda vending machines, you returned the bottle and they were washed and refilled with more soda and sold again. Even the metal bottle tops were collected when you used the opener, and I assume reused or recycled.
I have had dreams about being in a collapsed society when people have to be sent into ancient landfills to mine out the valuable aluminum and bits of metal and plastic solids. It's dangerous work because of the toxic slimes and gases, but out of the rubbles humans build meager villages. In other news, the most ideal way to get tasty beverages is from local companies who use glass bottle deposit system where they reuse them. That's super rare but some Portland, Oregon companies have done it, some still do, same with the Eugene area. You can also use your own glass growlers and fill them at tap houses with places that carry local companies. Here in Eugene we have Townsheds Kombucha for soda-like non-alcoholic beverage and plenty of beers. They use big reusable barrels, usually aluminum so their lighter, to supply the taps, too. With that system the only waste is in the transportation and product production, so getting at those things from a company that's production is within a couple hundred miles helps lower that a lot. 💖🏞️🍄💗
wow, I never really thought about fancy bumpy/dimple filled bottles taking more plastic to make and the cap ring thing hindering recycling efficiency even though it's so obvious
I am really passionate about this area of waste management. I would love sources or future videos on how all of these different things get recycled and what greater impacts are there of these systems.
I like how you inadvertently summed up our modern economy so succinctly: no one understands almost anything, but a few people do understand each little thing, and that's enough.
Glass is easier to recycle than plastic. No fumes released, less heat needed to melt it than using raw ingredients. It is also inert, which plastic is not. So it's better for preserving food and drinks and better to recycle.
In parts of Europe, supermarkets have bottle return machines, where you get a voucher for about 5 cents for every plastic bottle you return to the shop. They're fab because they encourage more recycling, but also because they help you understand (and recoup!) the cost of the packaging your product comes in. I wish we had those everywhere. (As well as standardised bottle shapes!)
This video embodies exactly how I feel about recycling. Recently I’ve put significant effort to avoid eating out due to waste concerns or buying McDonald’s beverages because of their plastic lining. Most people have an astoundingly linear view of recycling and with corporations lobbying to keep their “brand identity” of dimple-y bottles doesn’t inspire much faith that the system will change. Frankly I’ve just started exclusively choosing aluminium as my single use product of choice due to its ease of recycling. Even then, I was unaware of glass’ inefficiencies, so thanks for the knowledge, Hank!
Edith Spencer Is it just a general collection fee? I mean I have no idea how it works. Here you pay according to the volume you produce, to incourage you to have less. They way they do it is that you have to buy specific garbage bags that are taxed accordingly.
@@CamCamCamCamCamCamCamCamCammmm It definitely depends on the local government. My sister pays for recycling separately but when I went to add recycling my city said: "this is priced into your property taxes, so you just need to call public works and ask them to bring you a bin for collection". Recycling is collected at a different time of day and I think it's only collected every other week (on the assumption less is being produced I believe) but with garbage, in general, we don't have any price discrimination based on how much is collected. If you have an inordinate amount of waste and need to take to a landfill on your own (like if you ripped up your carpet to put new flooring in and you can't just fit that in your garbage bin). Sometimes they charge depending on what you are dropping off. The landfill is largely also operated off of local level taxes though so only things that are intensive to dispose of for the city would need to be charged. Could you share more about your country's practices?
Stephanie Lemons Yeah, so basically what happens here is you have to buy the garbage bags at your local shop and they are very expensive (though I couldn‘t say off hand, because my parents do the shopping) because they are taxed. Meaning that you get taxed in relation to how much waste you actually produce and not just a fraction of your general taxes (It may well not be just subsidies through the bags, but it definitely gives you an insentive to have less trash). But then the recycling is free (/no extra fee), where paper and cardboard and in some other things are collected, like garbage, at your house and the rest needs to be brought back to a collection post, which most towns have, or the stores and what not. If you have big thing they also need to be brought to a center where they can decide what can be done with it, this might also include a fee, but I don‘t know if it‘s more than the volume equivalent or how that works exactly. I can gladly explain more if that wasn‘t clear.
There is a huge problem which you didn't touch upon. When these landfills fill every town and village, it seeps into the underground water contaminating everything. Not to mention the stink it raises for miles upon miles. And if electronics find their way in there, then the ground would die and pollute the water with heavy metals which is ingested by people.
I always put bottles and cans in the return machines if they qualify. I get 5c back, but more importantly, it seems like those things are guaranteed to be recycled because I'm doing the sorting labor for them--whereas not everything I put in the curbside bin will actually be recycled, based on what I've read/watched recently.
Love everything about this video - another fine example of your research and passion yielding digestible and shareable important knowledge. As a business owner and marketer of some 25+ years, the best business gem you delivered is even more applicable in one's day to day life and attitude: Compete on the Product - Not on the Bottle. #DFTBA
I think this is the case for medicines which are sold in dark glass bottles, but I don't think that's the reason for the sprite bottles to be green. Do you know an example of something which is sold in dark plastic for decomposition reasons?
Scotland are currently implementing a bottle return scheme. All beverage cases- plastic, glass and aluminium will cost 20p more and you get 20p back when returning to be reused or recycled. This is really good for 4 reasons: - it financially gives the packaging a cost and so brings them into the economy in that way - it's incentive for people to recycle, not for free any more because there is a return for that - there is incentive to buy less - extra money gained from unreturned bottles is going to be used to subsidize recycling and reusing plants
I'm old enough to remember the previous system where glass bottles in Scotland could be returned to get your deposit back - I remember it being a 10p deposit back in the 80s. Irn-Bru kept it going longer than anyone else but all the local companies selling bottles of ginger used to take their glass bottles back too. Glad to see we are going back to a bottle return scheme and extending it to plastic and aluminium too. It's a pity that the HDPE milk bottles are going to be excluded though
I'd like to suggest that plastic bottles should still have at least two ridges (one near the top and one near the bottom) that are standard across all brands. I don't have a lot of strength in my left hand, which is my primary hand for non-writing or non-cane tasks. When I'm out and about and drinking out of a plastic bottle, the ridge at the top of a Gatorade bottle or the curve of a Coke bottle actually helps me keep it in my hand and not drop it (pretty much the only reason I don't drink most Pepsi products). PS before anyone comes at me with that "just ask someone to help you!" BS: Disabled people like to be independent, just like you do. I do not want to have to rely on someone else to hydrate or feed me, especially when I already rely on others to help me with so much.
**watches Vlogbrothers video** **is so ready for a hankschannel discussion** **has to go to appointment** **pulls into parking lot** **gets notification** **sigh**
I mostly agree, but also feel it is important to consider the effect waste has on wildlife, which wasn’t really mentioned here. A glass or plastic jar or bottle is not ever equivalent to a rock when you throw it away as there is the risk of an animal getting stuck in it. Or all the plastic ending up in the ocean where animals eat them by accident. And so on. We do need to reduce waste and be more responsible with how we dispose of it. It isn’t enough to for example regulate bottle shape and thickness.
@@Wltrwllyngaeiou didn't know that happened, but I'm a bit skeptical about how it might occur. Like, in a sealed bottle, even a flimsy one, how much pressure will leak through ?
I couldn't find any great sources on this, but it seems pretty well established that soda stored in plastic bottles goes flat in a year or so. If I remember my transport class correctly, the concentration of CO2 "dissolved" in the walls of the bottle decays exponentially with distance from the inside of the container. So going even slightly thinner would dramatically reduce that lifetime.
@@Wltrwllyngaeiou Fascinating ! I never would've thought ! Well even when I think I know stuff, I really don't eh ? Thanks ! Mind you, if I kept soda in the house I might've stumbled on the fact myself, but there you go !
We have a dairy company in Arizona that sells all their milk products in glass bottles. The cool thing they do is they will pay customers $2 for every glass that they return at the store, so they can reuse the bottles. After seeing this video it's cool to see I know of a company reusing their glass.
Thank you so much Hank for doing this video, it's really useful to look at the lifecycle costs of the products we use. I'm currently studying Environmental Science, with a focus in pollution control, and this is something we look at in my classes. However, one thing that people often overlook are the lifecycle costs of renewable energy. Most people want to think that renewables will last forever, but in reality they usually don't last more than 2-3 decades at best. Then you have too look at the costs of replacing them and then also disposing of them it actually adds up in a really bad way. While I imagine wind turbines are probably fairly easy to recycle, as their mostly metal, solar panels are a huge problem. Just like your were talking about with DVD's having a bunch of different things which make them hard to recycle, solar panels are much much worse. They have toxic elements like Cadmium, and Arsenic in them which makes disposing of them and recycling them a very dangerous proposition, and unfortunately we very well may need a lot of them. A couple of authors in their book, Roadmap to Nowhere, (which you can read for free roadmaptonowhere dot com) estimated that according to some of the most popular 100% wind water solar plans for the United States, we would need to keep bringing online 1.23 million square meters of solar panels every day.... FOREVER, in order to keep up with the old solar panels that need to be retired at the end of their lifespan. These are some of the other lifecycle costs we need to look at when we look at dealing with our energy. And to finish I'm certainly not saying that global warming isn't a thing we need to deal with desperately. I'm just saying that that we need to be very careful when we look at the solutions we are trying to implement in order to combat it, because sometimes they might end up doing almost as much harm as good.
Hm..Im surprised by what you say about glas recycling. Is that an American thing? Because from what I know, recycling glas works fairly well and actually is quite energy/resource saving here. Although of course, bottles that go straight back for refill are preferable. I mainly have recyclable glas from stuff like tomato sauce or gherkins, not drinks. It’s kinda hard, to avoid them there.
As far as I understand (from my sister, who got it from work and she works in a lab that researches water and soil pollution) recycling glass is less intensive than making new glass (which is actually quite energy and resource intensive that's why sand theft is a thing) and depending on the local requirements might be less polluting than reusing glass because some of the products they use to clean glass bottles are quite nasty.
It takes the same amount of energy to melt glass regardless of what country you do it in. Recycled glass is a bit easier to make than new glass, but aluminium is better for recycling because recycled aluminium is SO MUCH easier to make than new aluminium.
And, unfortunatelly, glass is super heavy which means transporting it uses much, much more carbon. Sadly, most of plastic alternatives are way less energy efficient.
That's right glass is the most material efficient in recycling because it is the least transformed between each use-form and requires the least new raw material input. New glass requires a lot of processing to clear the SiO2 of slag but that's all pretty much not required in recycling glass, while on the other hand thermoplastic polymer chains undergoes scission after remelt so their quality drops regardless and new raw material input is needed to maintain quality. Also, the argument for recycling isn't to avoid landfills or to conserve energy, it's to reduce/slow down resource excavation. Carbon/mineral/ore extraction is moving material from underground to above ground, taxing the cycles that balance them, hence increased atmospheric carbon because the aboveground system is not a strong enough sink. True carbon neutral (and material neutral) means no more excavation of material to be moved above ground, and honestly we need to capture and rebury them. In that sense, landfills actually work somewhat, especially land reclamation landfills, which bury the trash and turn it into land. It's infertile and could leach plastic degradation products, but at least it's buried back down.
In Norway we have "pant" for bottles & drinks cans. Basically a small amount of the price you pay is actually for the bottle (it is the same for all brands but differs depending on the size) & when you finish the drink you bring the bottles & cans (so long as they weren't too dented) back & you get the "pant" back. It is like a small deposit on the bottles. It isn't a huge amount but it adds up if you bring a lot of bottles back. A lot of people just collect them as they would the recycling but the difference is you take the bottles down to the local shop & recycle them where you get a receipt for the "pant" which you can use at the shop as payment. As kids we would often collect any cans or bottles we saw if there were any lying around, & we would recycle them & then buy sweets or magazines. It meant we had pretty clean streets & it really does encourage recycling. I wish more places did it tbh because it worked really well.
... I always throw the bottle caps away (I was told once in my childhood they were not recyclable I’m sure and I never thought to question it), and then recycle the actual bottle. I never once thought about removing the little circle thing and yet in retrospect that seems painfully obvious. Ahhh. 😅💀
in Germany, we actually have a system for recycling where every bottle costs 25cents extra and when you return the empty bottle, you get the 25cents back. it's only for liquids/beverages, but there it's mandatory for all plastic and glass bottles as well as cans, and has helped a lot with bringing up the amount of recycled packaging.
So glad you did this video and would love to see more of it. You talking about the value of a soda bottle reminded me of the book Beyond the Beautiful Forevers - some people collect plastic and get money for its recycled value and live off that money. Value is completely subjective.
It is had to understand how bad you are to reuse and recycle ind the US. Where I live we have a small "pant/deposit" on every bottle that you get back when you return them. The glass bottles are reuse and the plastic is recycled. We also have glass containers where all the glass without a "pant/deposit" can be delivered it is the sorted into more than 100 different types of jars and bottles. Broken glass are remelted (It only takes 1/7 of the energy of creating glass in the first place) or it can be reused at glass wool if the quality is low. I think there is a good case to make for glass vs plastic. plastic often end up en nature, it can be blown around by the wind, and it just feels like worthless waste, where as glass is not thrown away as much it might be due to the feeling of quality, stiffness or the weight but I see less glass in nature than I see cans and plastic bottles. Also we need to remember that the packaging in some cases protect something that also to a lot over resources to make, thus in some cases the packaging might be ok. The colors can actually also be used to protect the product, the dark wine bottles are used to protect the wine from sunlight. Crash Course Enviommental Studies should cover this. How to reuse, recycle and when packaging is good or bad. Looking forward for that. :-)
This whole argument is fascinating, and makes me think about where I live, glass beer bottles are standardized like this. You get your bottle deposit back when you return them to a beer vendor, they collect them all, move them to a cleaning plant, then the beer makers put new product in the washed bottles. You are still paying for all the transport, but the bottles are reused many times. You can actually tell how many times a bottle has been used because they put a little dot of glass on the bottom of the bottle every time it's reused.
This video has largely made me realise JUST how completely useless the entirety of Coca Cola is. Like, I’d just love to ask the CEO of the Coca Cola company to give me one good reason for it to actually exist. Because clearly the fact that I love and get to drink Coke Zero and the company gets to make a huge amount of money is in no way worth the astonishing environmental cost.
Could you not say the same thing about the vast majority of entertainment? TV shows and movies have a large environmental cost as well, as does the running of the internet. Some of it is valuable to society, but a lot of it is unnecessary and just environmentally costly. But do I want the government to make superfluous internet use illegal? Definitely not
@@kevinwells9751 Absolutely, and I'm not even saying the Coca Cola company _shouldn't_ exist. It's just an interesting reflection of how extravagant a lot of day-to-day things are.
Coca Cola, as with every for-profit corporation, exists because we pay them to exist, and they do what they do because we pay them to do it. If you're ever mad at a company for doing something (See: the memes about how 100 companies produce 71% of carbon emissions), just remember that companies will always and only do what we pay them to do. They're not moral agents of their own. They're aggregations of our consumer decisions.
Clearly our taste buds heightened sensitivity to sugars, and the pleasurable chemicals our bodies release to tell us we got the ripest fruit, are what drive the popularity of sodas. By purchasing fruits to quench this chemical desire we support farmers, and the actual plant life that maintains earth's livability for all species. Or we can succumb to the bombardment of merchandising propaganda and produce an existential garbage problem.
I was actually drinking Coke Zero while watching this video. A fountain drink out of a cup, so no plastic or glass that I know about, but still. I have mixed emotions about this.
As someone who worked as a lab tech in R&D for a sports drink company, the thickness of the plastic of the bottles is needed in order to hot-fill the bottles with the beverage. This takes out the sterilization step in the production line (which is also energy intensive) and makes it so that you don’t need preservatives in the beverage. So the weight there does have a bit more of a reason.
glass is actually reasonably easy to recycle, it gets cleaned, sorted by color, crushed, then shipped off to be made into new stuff. generally the degradation is nearly non existent if sorted right. plastic bags(and other thin plastic) are a huge issue though, even if they have the little #2/4 on them they can NOT typically go into the recycle bin as very few municipalities have the facilities to sort them out properly. you need to bring them somewhere that offers specific recycling for bags like a large grocery store. if they get recycled normally, they clog up the mechanisms used to sort the rest of the recycling. this can stop the lines several times a day while workers go and cut the plastic away by hand. it is actually better to throw them in the trash if you are not going to bring them to be recycled properly because that is where it will end up anyway, just with more work involved.
It's the fact that a glass bottle going into a landfill isn't bad, it's just silicon dioxide, and melting down a glass bottle to reuse it isn't any better then just creating new glass. When you recycle a plastic bottle you save them from having to pump crude oil, then do a bunch of work on the crude oil to turn it into plastic. So you save a lot of energy by recycling plastic, while glass saves barely any.
The cost to sort and clean the bottles plus transport them back to a glass plant and melt it into new glass is significantly more than just melting new silica sand that's moved in bulk.
As a kid I made extra pocket money taking glass bottles back to the shop to collect the deposit you used to have to pay. I think the bottles were re-used rather than recycled. Also my mum remembers taking treacle and syrup tins to the shop to be refilled. Great stuff Hank! Keep up the good work.
I really love this! I am studying marine science, so I am super into plastics, waste management and how to make things more sustainable. I do weekly beach cleans and the sad thing is most of the products are avoidable. Once I saw the packaging for my favourite candy on the beach it hasn't seemed like such a necessary part of my life. Instead of buying soft drinks in plastic,glass or tin, I choose to make my own syrups from scratch- The raw ingredients like the sugar, lemons and ginger may still have the high carbon air miles, however at least the waste on my end is compostable. I know that I go beyond what most people are happy to do, but I don't want my career to be finding out how our previous actions have fucked everything up. Also, PLEASE DO A CRASH COURSE ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES IT WOULD BE INCREDIBLE!
I learned way more than i expected to from this video, especially re:glass. I always assumed it was easy to recycle because it's easy to clean and basically unadulterated (like, there aren't 4 types of glass in one bottle). I already reuse some glass jars but it's good to know i should make more of an effort to reuse or avoid it as packaging.
Hank: it's far too complex, it's impossible to actually grasp or really understand Kurzgesaget: Hold my worm CGP Grey: Hold my podcast Crash Course: Ooh a new idea for a multi-episode subject!
So I was with you, but you lost me at the bottle design rant. Different bottle designs are not for marketing. Different products require different features for product preservation and filling. Vitamin water is sensitive to oxygen and requires barrier to protect the product. The purpose of packaging is to prevent food waste via better product protection. Does marketing get involved, yes, but they aren't the primary drivers of container design in most cases. Sprite is a carbonated beverage. Geometric design in both hot filled (vitamin water) and CSD containers, allows for those containers to be stronger with LESS PLASTIC. Nobody wants more plastic in containers except resin manufacturers (who do not control container design). Coke is not willing to pay for more plastic and the cost of shipping the additional weight just for marketing.
this. @hankschannel . Additionally, take a trip to a grocery store while they are stocking or a warehouse. A badly designed plastic container (AHEM, PANERA SOUPS WTF) will make itself known quite quickly and will be the bane of every worker there as well as the logistics people who have to deal with destroyed product.
Marketing is absolutely a factor, that's why so many of them have trademarked shapes instead of all the companies using one optimal shape for water and one optimal shape for carbonated drinks and one optimal shape for juice. Coke bottles aren't a different shape from Pepsi bottles because the products are different, they're a different shape because of marketing.
To be fair, I love those bottles. But I also reuse the sh!t outta them. Basically until the plastic cap breaks or degrades or gets gross. It'd be awesome if we had standardized (glass) bottles - then you could have 3rd party businesses that make infinitely reusable caps instead of plastic ones.
Hank's concern about the leaving the tamper ring on the main bottle totally clicked in my head. In Germany (probably elsewhere in Europe as well but my main experience is in Germany), some manufacturers sell bottles where the tamper seal breaks only most of the way around, not the whole way around, so it still comes off with the rest of the bottle cap (Adelholzener water comes to mind, but others as well). It used to bug me because I'm used to having the ring leftover and not hanging off the bottle cap but knowing this makes a LOT of sense.
In Sweden we have a special system to encourage people to recycle bottles called pant (essentially ‘pawning’). Whenever you buy a bottle of something in Sweden, there is an additional cost of 1kr (just over 10 cents) which you get back if you recycle the bottle where you’re supposed to. It’s a decent system. In addition, at the recycling station, they give the option of donating your recycling money to charity.
In germany we do reuse glas bottles. We pay a deposit when buying any bottle (8-15ct) which you get back when returning the bottles. There are two different systems when giving back bottles/cans. Some are recycled (Einweg-Flasche or in englisch One-time-use-bottle) which are most of the plastic bottles. Others are reused (mehrweg-flaschen or multiple-use-bottles) which are mostly beer and other glass bubbles. These are collected and then returned to the companies which then clean them and reuse them which is pretty neat I think. All this information is just from the top of my head so more research might be needed but I really like the system as it has other benefits as well: -Streets are cleaner as no one leaves empty bottles and if they do they are then collected and returned by homeless people for expample. -it is a benefit for homeless people as they can collect the bottles and them "earn" money that way by collecting them
On the bottle thing: Everyone's cans already basically look the same already, and guess what? They're doing fine! The businesses have found ways to market that don't involve the SHAPE OF THE PACKAGE as much! Thanks for making me think about things in a way I've never thought about before.
The focus on the separating the plastic on the plastic bottles is interesting, because in Japan, they have a designated bag for the PET bottle, but you're expected to remove the label and the cap from that bottle before you recycle it (note: there are places where you just toss in the whole bottle still though). And all the Japanese bottles I've used don't have the soft plastic part in the lids, and the labels are easy to remove. It's intriguing how different countries and jurisdictions handle their recycling streams.
In countries like Japan and Germany there are strict rules on recycling where your trash might not be collected if you haven't sorted it properly. And here in Australia there are money incentives for returning cans, plastic and glass bottles to deposit stations. It really shocked me when visiting the US to find that most Americans don't recycle. You're right that we definitely need to work on more solutions to get those numbers up to 100%.
I love mad and educational Hank
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Here I was thinking I was the only one that had the same thoughts about the bottle, everyone around doesn't care and just places them in the recycling bin, and Glass is annoying as some just buy the product for the container.
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Crash Course Environmental Studies pls?
This.
Yes! I loved studying environmental studies. It was my favourite subject :)
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Yes please!!
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I wish manufacturers were responsible for recycling their products. Then there'd be an economic benefit to making a product more recyclable.
Europe would like to remind you, you can have a system across a continent that reuses glass and plastic.
The system is two-fold:
*bars get crates of glass bottles and hand back crates of empty bottles.
*supermarkets tax people when they buy bottles, be it glass or plastic (like beer bottles).
you get your tax back when you deposit them back at a store which sells that brand of product.
it is in the form of a discount slip for the next time you buy something at the supermarket chain you deposited them at.
QWERTY man +
we have that here in ny. it’s not on everything just milk and dairy products. we buy and keep the bottles to reuse as drinking glasses and flower vases. they tax about $2 and give it back once you return it to the farm
They used to do this in the UK. The pop man (at least, where I'm from) would drop off fizzy drinks like the willy wonka milk man. Also shops took returns too. They don't do that now. There are glass milk bottles again now though, I wonder what the overall effect of that rinse and return scheme is, whether it's worth going back to that from plastic. Also the bottles are way smaller than the big milk things I get. I also get milk from a farm 3 miles away in those plastic bottles (and icecream) so... that's a big thing too.
ugh yes nothing like being a student, hosting a party and hogging the recycling machine for a good hour the next day so you can buy groceries for the week
@@maritrndal815 i can't tell if this is sarcastic.
i'll assume it is.
the machines can take bottles by the crate (for decades now).
so if you drink 3 crates in a night, just put 3 empty crates in. done in 30 seconds.
Yes Crash Course environmental studies!!! Political implications, future stuff that still aren't common but will change the world, different methods of recycling around the world, what we personally can do, what big companies need to do etc. For instance in Norway most of the plastic we find on our beaches do not come from Norway because we recycle pretty well (could always be better!).
Actually not true. A LOT of the waste is from fish farms, fisheries and maritime use, and also from land-based activities - all from Norway. I've been part of several clean up projects where we sent the collected thrash to be analyzed for the origins. On the west coast, most of the plastic found is "local".
If we add in micro plastics and nano plastics, that originates mostly from traffic, and it is much harder to see (and clean up).
Yes, we recycle more, but not enough. Far from.
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@@thomasr7129 hey! I realised I didn't get spesific enough, when I wrote the post I was thinking of plastic bottles spesifically! You are definitely right in the fact we aren't doing enough! :)
@@Norwaycat91 - Plastic bottles are refunded in Norway, and with the new increase in deposit, maybe even more people make sure that they are recycled.
Such arrangements - where you have to pay a deposit fee that is refunded when you hand in the old / empty / used product, should be more widespread.
There's also work in progress on increasing the number of "refund centers" where they take in the waste and handle it. Many harbors have such facilities for plastic waste and discarded fishing gear.
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You pointing at an empty Vitamin Water and yelling "THIS SHOULD BE ILLEGAL" is my favorite Hank.
my favorite part is at 14:00 when he nearly says "THIS IS ILLEGAL". not yet, but soon
The last sixty seconds of Coca-Cola directed rage are the biggest mood I have seen in forever!
I work for them and I feel that shit every single day
@@inademv Haha, I work for Coca-Cola too. I'm a QC lab tech. The environmental impact makes me sad.
" Compete on the product , not on the bottles"
Well said!!! 👍
When what you're doing is selling basically the same sugar water, you need to advertise the feeling of the product - with a cleverly designed bottle - whose shape is designed specifically to make it look like you;'re getting more than what you paid for...
wonder whether they'll listen though
well, it's kinda a two-way street. if consumers would only decide based on the product itself, companies would compete on that instead of packaging or whatever. you always have to take your own actions into account as well, since that is basically what marketers do on a societal level
HI CRASHING COURSE ON ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES IS A FANTASTIC IDEA!!!
Jana Choo crash my course papa!
Heck yeah! I did it for A-Level but that was a few years ago. I'd love to see an updated version.
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I'd really love a more in depth video as to why glass
@@HankaAAR way less then melting silicate sand into glass.
Lot of recycled glass is used into new glass making as it makes melting sand easier.
And also you can do it forever without material loss, plastic at some point is just trash.
Recycle is about more then just one time getting it back.
Also I love how Hank is ok, with piles of trash, as he leaves in a country were space is abandon.
Not every place on earth has enough space that is no nature enough that we can use it to dump infinite trash forever.
Glass is much better, if you use it right. Modern culture is not much for reusing stuff, so then glass becomes bad. But saving glass jars to use for storing stuff is the ideal state or returning them. In the Danish return system glass is used a lot, by actually reusing the glass bottle, but then you have to make sure people return the glass bottles to the stores.
In my two sense this debate shows how complicated environmental issues are, and the correct solution depends on what you care about. Plastic, even if recycled, is often downcycled meaning it will still end up in the landfill after a few reuses. So, if you're concerned with a lack of landfill space or plastic pollution then glass is a better option. The other side of that it carbon footprint of course (which plastics are produced from petroleum so if we want to completely stop taking out fossil fuels we will have to stop using plastic). Given that most manufacturing processes today use fossil fuels, it's clearly a larger carbon footprint to use glass. However, if everything was powered by renewables, then glass would likely be preferable from a carbon footprint standpoint. Of course more energy needed means more metals to be mined to produce solar panels, etc. So basically there is no best option, only better options depending on which aspect you care about. My advice is to do your best to use what you already have and reuse what is inevitable for you to buy.
Charles Nielsen Avalon Dairy where I live reuses their milk bottles. You can see a year on the bottle and imagine how many times the bottle has been reused. They charge a $1 deposit to encourage people to return them. I choose to buy it even though it is more expensive. But I feel it hits my “ buy local” and “low waste” buttons. Also their chocolate milk it the best.
i study material science of glass and ceramic and yeah, glass does take a lot of energy to recycle, but not nearly as much, as making new glass does. The amorph state of the glass lets it melt at way cooler temperatures, than the kristaline minerals you use to make it in the first place. so please definitly recycle your glass! be sure not to mix regular glass with high temperature resistant glass like oven doors, lab-glass etc or your grandmas old lead glass. i can see that being a huge problem with recycling, but since i dont work in recycling im actually not too sure whether thats a much of a problem at all.
that said reusing or not purchasing any pakaging is of course the best solution.
in germany you pay a few cents for most glass bottles, and when you return them you get that money back and they get reused over and over.
I do research on using bacteria to degrade plastic and I think about this a lot.
HolyGrayle Just out of curiosity, how do you ensure the bacteria doesn’t spread and endanger plastics in use across the world. Are the environmental conditions for these bacteria specific enough that they won’t be able to propagate?
@@Empyreal81 Interesting question. Some materials like wood can decompose, but under the right conditions can be sturdy for hundreds of years.
@@Detson404 Imagine a world where plastic rots like wood.
@@Empyreal81 Since we have microplastics in every environment, I'm not sure we'd want to keep these bacteria from spreading? If plastic "rotted" like wood does we'd just end up treating it like wood.
Loren Z For example, if the bacteria spread to hospital equipment and started disintegrating it.
I'm an intern at a packaging design firm. "Your bottles are going to look like other people's bottles. Compete on the product." totally resonated with me. I see these old designers making these needlessly complicated designs and not taking into consideration how wall thicknesses, color, and material affect our planet and our future.
(1) Reduce
(2) Reuse
(3) Recycle
It's not just a set of good things to do, it's also an order of operations. Before you decide to recycle/bin something, ask whether you can reuse/repurpose it. Before you acquire something that you could reuse/recycle, ask yourself whether you can avoid acquiring it in the first place.
Yes! People do forget to do this in the best order.
hank's going OFF rn
For real tho the standard bottle shape makes a whole lot of sense, it would be the same as standardised shipping containers
I feel like a beer company used to make beer bottles to be reused as building bricks which I thought was really awesome. Plus they were rectangular which seems good for shipping.
Wow! This reminds me of the 'plain packaging' argument over tobacco products!
@@jedigecko06 I think plain packaging for tobacco is more about decreasing brand power over potentially vulnerable consumers over making recycling a more seamless process so we don't destroy this planet as quickly.
@@CatCaffeine 2 birds. :)
If all transport was run of renewables and all bottles was made of glass (which can be recycled using renewables) there would be no need to impose regulation on bottle shape and size. Improve dont impose
great video! one detail: this aluminium can is containing a "hidden" plastic bottle inside (the inner layer) so that the alu is not reacting with the content of the can.
This was actually very interesting. Im surprised at how into it i was 😂
i was under the impression that plastic bottles were NOT turned back into other bottles; that they were turned into lower quality plastics such as truck beds, plastic outdoor furniture, or plastic filling
Hank seems to be making a lot of very unfounded statements. Like glass is somehow worse than plastic. Glass is far more recyclable as long as types are separated.
Thraxarious Tailchaser Glass CAN be recycled but rarely is. As Hank said, it is a very energy intense process to recycle glass, and because glass is so heavy, it is very expensive to transport as well. Many places that accept glass for recycling sell it for other purposes, such as aggregate, rather than melting it down and forming new glass products. Glass gets an A+ if it gets reused, but is a huge hog on resources to recycle.
@@rrg419 glass is still easier to recycle than it is to make from raw materials. Which Hank points out is why we recycle plastic.
Glass imo is a much better material than plastic it's more reusable, if it does get trashed it gets eroded without damaging the environment and it can be recycled.
Look at milk cartons. There is no reason not to go for glass bottle milk, you return the bottle they clean it and put more milk in it the only waste is the foil recyclable top, if it gets broken it gets recycled but over its life that glass milk bottle has saved making 50 plastic cartons. Sure you could recycle all the milk cartons but that's inefficient and has a way worse carbon footprint. The tenets of reduce reuse recycle are in order of importance recycle is really the least importantant step but 'buy less crap' doesn't exactly sell to consumers.
I think he mentioned downgraded plastic later. It can be made into new bottles, but isn't as easy to do as aluminum. It does get downgraded a lot, into items that can't be easily recycled again, like clothing or carpet.
I think HDPE like from milk jugs (#2) is more commonly made into the products your describing. And #5 plastics are made into some of those products, too. I think #1 plastic is recycled into polyester a lot of the time.
Back to when I was a kid and glass bottles with deposits were common, the quart glass bottles had aluminum caps with a built-in tamper ring. When you unscrewed the cap several compressed tabs around the base of the cap were forced open by a lip on the bottle. They were as easy if not easier than the plastic caps. One more reason why returnable glass bottles "back in the day" were better.
An example: images.app.goo.gl/Frg41HGHsfeq2AE89
The caps were screwed onto the bottle, then a machine crimped the bottom of the cap, pressing the aluminum under a glass lip. The base of the cap was several tabs around the circumference, and the tabs were perforated. When you unscrewed the cap the glass lip forced the tabs apart. You could hear the tabs snapping apart from each other. It was a reliable and ingenious little product quality device, letting you know that no one had opened the bottle and let out the fizz...and it left nothing behind on the bottle!
Plastic lids could do the same, but would require a more complicated machine to apply. The genius of the plastic caps is that they are installed as they are, as a one-way screw on cap. Quite brilliant on their own, albeit wasteful.
In Germany we still have those, including the returnable glass bottles. I'm not sure how much work it is to clean them up, but I'm pretty sure it's less resources than recycling or producing new. So I do not really agree with the "glass is terrible" sentiment
@@JJ-cc2eh Pretty sure it's cheaper and less resource intensive to create new glass than recycle it if you aren't factoring in something like a tax incentive. Since glass is already dirt cheap, all you're really doing when you recycle it is add extra steps to the manufacturing process. I think reusable bottles (I always forget if it's pop-tops or twist-offs, but I assume it's the pop-tops) are the exception, though.
@@JJ-cc2eh The returnable bottles of that time were very sturdy. That could also mean shipping is a matter coz of weight. With the modern automation afoot nowadays I could picture a machine that accepts and washes returning bottles that also fills and caps them on the spot. Think Soda Stream but on a scale, and with a more efficient carbonation source. Just connect water and power and off you go.
Really, the touch-screen self-serve fountains have us almost all the way there. Just add the bottle management function and let it run from there. Humans would have to maintain with syrup, bottle resupply, etc. All very solvable problems.
From now on, I will probably always think "Compete on the product, not on the bottle!" each time I choose a soda to buy.
Claudia Jenrich might be better to stop buying Soda, nutritionally they have zero value and they have a huge carbon footprint. If you learn to drink water or juice your own fruit, you save a ton of money and also help the planet. Or if you super need soda you could use a reusable container and soda dispensers. :)
@@soupsgord That definitely would be the best option. Reusable bottles/cups etc are awesome! I own some. Where I live we don't have soda dispensers though - I've never seen one outside a restaurant anyway. However, I don't buy soda a lot anyway these days. Little steps :)
Ever seen the system in The Netherlands? They have standard bottles for lots of thing (less now than in the past though), and lots of things come in those. You bring them back to any store, get some cash back, and the bottles get cleaned and refilled. When we were children we were so impressed by that system when on vacation there.
In Belgium, glass has been recycled by the government for as long as I remember. An official video can be found on vimeo.com/122509881 by the way. General information on www.fostplus.be/en/sorting-recycling/all-about-recycling/recycling-glass
Hope you enjoy that information :)
Better still is beer bottles which are thoroughly washed in the factory and then re-used.
@@Dooban Same goes for some wine brands, like those from certain supermarkets and fair trade stores. Good point!
It is one of the few occasions when looking at the USA is like looking at a developing country where things are still managed like in a distant past.
@@Schmidtelpunkt I have that same feeling when looking at their health care :P
Same idea in south america. You can look at a rack of sodas and see 3-4 generations of the same volume glass bottle with identical contents, all scuffed a little more/less.
As a German, I was obviously thinking "Pfand!!" the whole time... xD
i was scrolling through the comments to find someone mentioning the german pfand, lol
In Dutch we call it "statiegeld", which sounds a lot less cool, but does have the similar benefit that people tend to return their (glass) beerbottles and the plastic crates they come in, all for reuse
As a Dane I was thinking "pant" xD
As a Norwegian also thinking "pant" :p
I am living in Germany to do my masters degree and I recycle more here than I have at any other time in my life!! It is such a strong incentive.
1. FYI for anyone in the comments, at least in DC, you're supposed to leave the plastic bottle caps on the bottle when recycling them! Caps by themselves are too small and get lost in the machinery. Always check your local govt website to see what you can and cannot recycle, and how to responsibly dispose of items.
2. Hank, you said "glass is so impossible/so hard to recycle". From what I understand, glass is 100% recyclable and doesn't degrade in quality (unlike plastic) - are you just referring to a large carbon load in glass recycling since it has to be heated up so much? What's your source on this?
3. IBM research just invented a new PET recycling process that handles colored plastic called VOLCAT which is pretty cool! look it up if u wanna
i'm pretty passionate about waste and recycling and the government regulation and economic and environmental impacts of it so i am DEEPLY interested in where you got your opinions from! (also if you ever need a researcher/writer for crash course environmental studies let me know :) )
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100% agree. Everyone should check their local regulations, for example where I live caps should only be left on if they have the same plastic number as the bottle. Most don't so they should be left off & recycled separately if they have their own recycling number or put into the trash :( if they don't have a number.
I recently came back from a trip. I don't remember where it was (I think it was Greece?) but the water bottles there had the tamper-proof cap seal be broken _horizontally_ instead of vertically. Instead of leaving a ring at the bottom, the ring remained attached to the top and instead cricked open into 3 parts (that is, 3 slits appeared on the side) which could then separate and slide up. Still tamper-proof, but also the entire cap stayed in one piece.
It was an amazing design.
!!! Thank you, this is so important, and I learned a lot.
(ps hank yelling "THIS SHOULD BE ILLEGAL" about one of the bottles is my new favorite thing)
I think the moment i read somewhere that switching all plastic products to metal or glass would actually make things worse for the planet (manufacturing and travel processes, etc) was the moment I fully comprehended there was no simple answer. We can't just buy fancier products or revert to a simpler time, there's no zero waste movement I can join to completely eliminate my impact. We hsve to change the structure of how things are made, moved, and consumed. It simultaneously makes me feel more and less guilty/stressed
that's why we have to re-use and stop relying on products that come from faraway places whenever possible
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There's a whole lot our society has the right to be mad at Coca-Cola for.
And Nestlé
One thing some places do to get more people to recycle is including a deposit in the purchase. In Alberta where I live any beverage bottle under a litre, you pay a 10 cent deposit for, over a litre 25 cents. You get the deposits back when you recycle the bottles at a depo. In addition to the deposit, we also pay an Eco Fee which offsets the cost of the recycling and deposit program. I can tell you from my experience that every beverage bottle I encounter gets recycled. Bottle litter is picked up by everyone from seniors, children doing fundraisers, to homeless people. I don't know how well the program works by the numbers but from an average Joe's perspective, it seems to work really well.
A local dairy here uses Glass bottles for their Milks. They charge a $1 deposit per bottle and you bring them back to the dairy and they have sterilize them all and re-use them. the only waste is a small plastic pop-off lid. But they use a Biodegradable plastic based off sugar-cane.
and even better, their Chocolate milk is amazing!
That's very cool. What's the brand?
Another problem with non biodegradable polymers is that small strands of the stuff (after a bottle has be decomposed by sun) are going to get everywhere and last for a long long time. Basically, by trowing away polymer products we are filling the global ecosystem with molecules it can do nothing about, some of which are harmful, some of which we don't know the effects of. That is not a wise think to do, one would say.
They've already found micro-plastics in humans which is a big yikes
While biodegradable polymers are a good idea in theory, one of the biggest problems with the currently developed ones is that they usually need to be in specific conditions to degrade properly (something usually not found in a landfill setting or nature). The other issue is that because they are made of special polymers, they can't be recycled with other plastics and are inherently less stable to recycle. The real solution here is to avoid throwing away plastics in the first place and only using plastics that can be easily recycled.
Why not just ban plastics for all non necesery uses (for packaging, consumer electronics etc) it is usualy just a cheaper alternative but we are paying a much greater cost that is not measured by money
I had a coca cola ad when I opened this video, lol..
As a kid growing up in the 70s and 80s I remember taking our glass soda bottles back to the grocery store for Discount I'm purchasing a new eight pack of sodas. I assume they went back to the bottlers were washed refill the product recapped and shipped back out to the grocery stores again.
I didn't know I needed that rant about bottles and the cocacola company today, but that was... deeply cathartic. I'm here for it. Thanks Hank!
Glass recycling works when it's not a single stream system (basically everywhere but America)
In my lifetime, glass recycling in the UK went from colour-segregated to single stream.
@@jedigecko06 it's not just glass recycling that's single-stream -- in most (all?) places in America, all recycling is single-stream unless you take it to a recycling center yourself.
People are recommending Crash Course Environmental Studies, and I think this hypothetical series needs all the unfiltered cursing kept in. Children need to understand that there's a time and place for profanity, and this is definitely one of those instances.
Absofuckinglutly
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Fuck yeah
I would patreon the fuck out of that
“Poured a bunch of LSD in it” LMAO thats the most boomer thing Hank has ever said
Feels like a prayer
i believe it was a reference to the movie "good time", but that might be me reading into it
also oh god sorry for answering a 2 year old comment
hank is gen x
@@jaelikesjackalopes why?
If only there were people filling bottles with LSD. 😂
Maybe a boomer will drink it and realize they're projecting their own entitlement onto children, while they donate their inheritance to charities in the most competitive job market in recent history.
Thanks Hank! Keep on giving me perspective to share with those I attempt to positively influence. I Love You! And also whoever reads this!
I agree with removing unnecessary bumps and colorations and making the rings easier to remove, but I think thicker plastic can have a value in reuseability.
The water in my house had a problem last summer and we had to buy a 40 pack of bottled water at the grocery store to drink, and all those bottles were really thin and efficient, but they also all went straight into the recycling because they were so fragile.
I bought a bottle of dasani water out of a vending machine on my first day of classes last September, carried it around in my backpack 4 days a week, and didn't recycle it until I was moving out of my dorm in May, and it was still as structurally sound as it was the day I bought it.
That one bottle may have used more plastic, but I used a lot less plastic than I would have if I'd had to buy a new bottle every week.
Our glass collection containers seperate into clear (white), green and brown (and presumably all other glass goes in there as well). Afaik seperating glass shards by colour with a sensor is fairly easy, would assume it's the same for PET plastic. So in theory they can just use the old green bottles to make green bottles again.
But glass is pretty... It's also way more sturdy than those flimsy plastic bottles or aluminium cans. And thus great for reusing. We have a glass bottle deposit system here, so each bottle gets reused up to 50 times before being recycled. (although since glass is heavy it's best used for local products that don't have to travel far) Oh yeah, those re-use bottles are also standardised. Some companies have their own special ones, which still get reused (glass and thick plastic), it just makes it more of a hassle to return them in the right shops.
I love that a lot of musicians have taken to making their CD cases paper :D
I was prepared to be upset with Hank, but he's actually got it right. We don't need plastic bans, we need better recycling systems.
I mean we could do both? Or reuse plastic. If you make the bottles a bit thicker they can be refilled (10 times or more? can't find exact numbers, but something like that). Which afaik requires less energy than recycling them every single time, and ofc also increases the whole lifecycle of the plastic, cause every time you melt it again the quality drops a little.
What about the end of the video where he literally points to the thick plastic bottle and goes 'this should be illegal'? We need both.
I was thinking of whether it would be feasible to shift to a raw product approach where the vendor buys the drink in bulk and people bring their reusable bottles to fill them.
@@oftinuvielskin9020 That would probably be difficult with carbonated drinks. But with other stuff that usually comes in plastic like liquid shampoos or dry foods that could work. My student co-op buys rice and pasta and lentils and nuts in bulk, and then we can bring our own jars to fill and pay by weight. People with allergies and celiac disease would still need access to plastic packaged products to prevent contamination so they don't get sick, but for most people, dry foods could go into re-usable packaging.
@@SomeoneBeginingWithI Isn't that kind of how it used to be with glass bottle soda vending machines, you returned the bottle and they were washed and refilled with more soda and sold again. Even the metal bottle tops were collected when you used the opener, and I assume reused or recycled.
I have had dreams about being in a collapsed society when people have to be sent into ancient landfills to mine out the valuable aluminum and bits of metal and plastic solids. It's dangerous work because of the toxic slimes and gases, but out of the rubbles humans build meager villages.
In other news, the most ideal way to get tasty beverages is from local companies who use glass bottle deposit system where they reuse them. That's super rare but some Portland, Oregon companies have done it, some still do, same with the Eugene area. You can also use your own glass growlers and fill them at tap houses with places that carry local companies. Here in Eugene we have Townsheds Kombucha for soda-like non-alcoholic beverage and plenty of beers. They use big reusable barrels, usually aluminum so their lighter, to supply the taps, too. With that system the only waste is in the transportation and product production, so getting at those things from a company that's production is within a couple hundred miles helps lower that a lot. 💖🏞️🍄💗
THIS
Love it when the passion for a stance is very much in your face! And, yes, A Crash Course would be excellent for this.
wow, I never really thought about fancy bumpy/dimple filled bottles taking more plastic to make and the cap ring thing hindering recycling efficiency even though it's so obvious
I am really passionate about this area of waste management. I would love sources or future videos on how all of these different things get recycled and what greater impacts are there of these systems.
I like how you inadvertently summed up our modern economy so succinctly: no one understands almost anything, but a few people do understand each little thing, and that's enough.
Glass is easier to recycle than plastic. No fumes released, less heat needed to melt it than using raw ingredients. It is also inert, which plastic is not. So it's better for preserving food and drinks and better to recycle.
In parts of Europe, supermarkets have bottle return machines, where you get a voucher for about 5 cents for every plastic bottle you return to the shop. They're fab because they encourage more recycling, but also because they help you understand (and recoup!) the cost of the packaging your product comes in. I wish we had those everywhere. (As well as standardised bottle shapes!)
I love these videos. It’s like a director’s cut with commentary. Time to get cozy and have a little think-watch. 🤓 🍿
This video embodies exactly how I feel about recycling. Recently I’ve put significant effort to avoid eating out due to waste concerns or buying McDonald’s beverages because of their plastic lining.
Most people have an astoundingly linear view of recycling and with corporations lobbying to keep their “brand identity” of dimple-y bottles doesn’t inspire much faith that the system will change.
Frankly I’ve just started exclusively choosing aluminium as my single use product of choice due to its ease of recycling. Even then, I was unaware of glass’ inefficiencies, so thanks for the knowledge, Hank!
In Switzerland we have to pay for our garbage, but not recycling, which I hope helps, don't know the actual stats though.
In many states in the USA people pay separate for garbage and recycling is considered in that fee.
Edith Spencer Is it just a general collection fee? I mean I have no idea how it works. Here you pay according to the volume you produce, to incourage you to have less. They way they do it is that you have to buy specific garbage bags that are taxed accordingly.
@@CamCamCamCamCamCamCamCamCammmm It definitely depends on the local government. My sister pays for recycling separately but when I went to add recycling my city said: "this is priced into your property taxes, so you just need to call public works and ask them to bring you a bin for collection". Recycling is collected at a different time of day and I think it's only collected every other week (on the assumption less is being produced I believe) but with garbage, in general, we don't have any price discrimination based on how much is collected. If you have an inordinate amount of waste and need to take to a landfill on your own (like if you ripped up your carpet to put new flooring in and you can't just fit that in your garbage bin). Sometimes they charge depending on what you are dropping off. The landfill is largely also operated off of local level taxes though so only things that are intensive to dispose of for the city would need to be charged. Could you share more about your country's practices?
Stephanie Lemons Yeah, so basically what happens here is you have to buy the garbage bags at your local shop and they are very expensive (though I couldn‘t say off hand, because my parents do the shopping) because they are taxed. Meaning that you get taxed in relation to how much waste you actually produce and not just a fraction of your general taxes (It may well not be just subsidies through the bags, but it definitely gives you an insentive to have less trash). But then the recycling is free (/no extra fee), where paper and cardboard and in some other things are collected, like garbage, at your house and the rest needs to be brought back to a collection post, which most towns have, or the stores and what not. If you have big thing they also need to be brought to a center where they can decide what can be done with it, this might also include a fee, but I don‘t know if it‘s more than the volume equivalent or how that works exactly. I can gladly explain more if that wasn‘t clear.
Hank is authentic, funny, and educational all at the same time and I love it so much.
There is a huge problem which you didn't touch upon. When these landfills fill every town and village, it seeps into the underground water contaminating everything. Not to mention the stink it raises for miles upon miles. And if electronics find their way in there, then the ground would die and pollute the water with heavy metals which is ingested by people.
I always put bottles and cans in the return machines if they qualify. I get 5c back, but more importantly, it seems like those things are guaranteed to be recycled because I'm doing the sorting labor for them--whereas not everything I put in the curbside bin will actually be recycled, based on what I've read/watched recently.
I love this video, but you completely made my day when you gave me the knowledge that you have seen and own Clue the movie.
Love everything about this video - another fine example of your research and passion yielding digestible and shareable important knowledge. As a business owner and marketer of some 25+ years, the best business gem you delivered is even more applicable in one's day to day life and attitude: Compete on the Product - Not on the Bottle. #DFTBA
Clear plastic is not always the best for the contents inside. Light can accelerate decomposition and other chemical processes.
I think this is the case for medicines which are sold in dark glass bottles, but I don't think that's the reason for the sprite bottles to be green. Do you know an example of something which is sold in dark plastic for decomposition reasons?
Scotland are currently implementing a bottle return scheme. All beverage cases- plastic, glass and aluminium will cost 20p more and you get 20p back when returning to be reused or recycled. This is really good for 4 reasons:
- it financially gives the packaging a cost and so brings them into the economy in that way
- it's incentive for people to recycle, not for free any more because there is a return for that
- there is incentive to buy less
- extra money gained from unreturned bottles is going to be used to subsidize recycling and reusing plants
I'm old enough to remember the previous system where glass bottles in Scotland could be returned to get your deposit back - I remember it being a 10p deposit back in the 80s. Irn-Bru kept it going longer than anyone else but all the local companies selling bottles of ginger used to take their glass bottles back too.
Glad to see we are going back to a bottle return scheme and extending it to plastic and aluminium too. It's a pity that the HDPE milk bottles are going to be excluded though
“Compete on the product, not the bottle” lol yup. Well said hank
I'd like to suggest that plastic bottles should still have at least two ridges (one near the top and one near the bottom) that are standard across all brands. I don't have a lot of strength in my left hand, which is my primary hand for non-writing or non-cane tasks. When I'm out and about and drinking out of a plastic bottle, the ridge at the top of a Gatorade bottle or the curve of a Coke bottle actually helps me keep it in my hand and not drop it (pretty much the only reason I don't drink most Pepsi products).
PS before anyone comes at me with that "just ask someone to help you!" BS: Disabled people like to be independent, just like you do. I do not want to have to rely on someone else to hydrate or feed me, especially when I already rely on others to help me with so much.
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**watches Vlogbrothers video**
**is so ready for a hankschannel discussion**
**has to go to appointment**
**pulls into parking lot**
**gets notification**
**sigh**
I mostly agree, but also feel it is important to consider the effect waste has on wildlife, which wasn’t really mentioned here. A glass or plastic jar or bottle is not ever equivalent to a rock when you throw it away as there is the risk of an animal getting stuck in it. Or all the plastic ending up in the ocean where animals eat them by accident. And so on. We do need to reduce waste and be more responsible with how we dispose of it. It isn’t enough to for example regulate bottle shape and thickness.
Aren't soda plastic bottles thicker to account for the pressure needed to keep the CO2 dissolved?
Take a shitty, flimsy water bottle, and try and inflate it if you want. You'll see, it holds the pressure up very well...
Holding pressure (not exploding) is very different from preventing diffusion of gas through the bottle over the course of months
@@Wltrwllyngaeiou didn't know that happened, but I'm a bit skeptical about how it might occur. Like, in a sealed bottle, even a flimsy one, how much pressure will leak through ?
I couldn't find any great sources on this, but it seems pretty well established that soda stored in plastic bottles goes flat in a year or so. If I remember my transport class correctly, the concentration of CO2 "dissolved" in the walls of the bottle decays exponentially with distance from the inside of the container. So going even slightly thinner would dramatically reduce that lifetime.
@@Wltrwllyngaeiou Fascinating ! I never would've thought ! Well even when I think I know stuff, I really don't eh ? Thanks ! Mind you, if I kept soda in the house I might've stumbled on the fact myself, but there you go !
I love that even though Hank doesn't work for ecogeek anymore, he's still passionate and enthusiastic about it and wants us all to be better.
Please do Crash Course Environmental Studies
(someone else commented this I'm just trying to signal boost, yes I liked it and left a "+" reply)
We have a dairy company in Arizona that sells all their milk products in glass bottles. The cool thing they do is they will pay customers $2 for every glass that they return at the store, so they can reuse the bottles. After seeing this video it's cool to see I know of a company reusing their glass.
Green plastic helps with shielding the content from light btw👀
Thank you so much Hank for doing this video, it's really useful to look at the lifecycle costs of the products we use. I'm currently studying Environmental Science, with a focus in pollution control, and this is something we look at in my classes.
However, one thing that people often overlook are the lifecycle costs of renewable energy. Most people want to think that renewables will last forever, but in reality they usually don't last more than 2-3 decades at best. Then you have too look at the costs of replacing them and then also disposing of them it actually adds up in a really bad way. While I imagine wind turbines are probably fairly easy to recycle, as their mostly metal, solar panels are a huge problem. Just like your were talking about with DVD's having a bunch of different things which make them hard to recycle, solar panels are much much worse. They have toxic elements like Cadmium, and Arsenic in them which makes disposing of them and recycling them a very dangerous proposition, and unfortunately we very well may need a lot of them. A couple of authors in their book, Roadmap to Nowhere, (which you can read for free roadmaptonowhere dot com) estimated that according to some of the most popular 100% wind water solar plans for the United States, we would need to keep bringing online 1.23 million square meters of solar panels every day.... FOREVER, in order to keep up with the old solar panels that need to be retired at the end of their lifespan. These are some of the other lifecycle costs we need to look at when we look at dealing with our energy.
And to finish I'm certainly not saying that global warming isn't a thing we need to deal with desperately. I'm just saying that that we need to be very careful when we look at the solutions we are trying to implement in order to combat it, because sometimes they might end up doing almost as much harm as good.
Hm..Im surprised by what you say about glas recycling. Is that an American thing? Because from what I know, recycling glas works fairly well and actually is quite energy/resource saving here. Although of course, bottles that go straight back for refill are preferable.
I mainly have recyclable glas from stuff like tomato sauce or gherkins, not drinks. It’s kinda hard, to avoid them there.
As far as I understand (from my sister, who got it from work and she works in a lab that researches water and soil pollution) recycling glass is less intensive than making new glass (which is actually quite energy and resource intensive that's why sand theft is a thing) and depending on the local requirements might be less polluting than reusing glass because some of the products they use to clean glass bottles are quite nasty.
TheSylda
Ah, thanks for the confirmation. It’s really one damn thing after another with trying to live environmentally friendly.
It takes the same amount of energy to melt glass regardless of what country you do it in.
Recycled glass is a bit easier to make than new glass, but aluminium is better for recycling because recycled aluminium is SO MUCH easier to make than new aluminium.
And, unfortunatelly, glass is super heavy which means transporting it uses much, much more carbon. Sadly, most of plastic alternatives are way less energy efficient.
That's right glass is the most material efficient in recycling because it is the least transformed between each use-form and requires the least new raw material input. New glass requires a lot of processing to clear the SiO2 of slag but that's all pretty much not required in recycling glass, while on the other hand thermoplastic polymer chains undergoes scission after remelt so their quality drops regardless and new raw material input is needed to maintain quality. Also, the argument for recycling isn't to avoid landfills or to conserve energy, it's to reduce/slow down resource excavation. Carbon/mineral/ore extraction is moving material from underground to above ground, taxing the cycles that balance them, hence increased atmospheric carbon because the aboveground system is not a strong enough sink. True carbon neutral (and material neutral) means no more excavation of material to be moved above ground, and honestly we need to capture and rebury them. In that sense, landfills actually work somewhat, especially land reclamation landfills, which bury the trash and turn it into land. It's infertile and could leach plastic degradation products, but at least it's buried back down.
In Norway we have "pant" for bottles & drinks cans. Basically a small amount of the price you pay is actually for the bottle (it is the same for all brands but differs depending on the size) & when you finish the drink you bring the bottles & cans (so long as they weren't too dented) back & you get the "pant" back. It is like a small deposit on the bottles.
It isn't a huge amount but it adds up if you bring a lot of bottles back. A lot of people just collect them as they would the recycling but the difference is you take the bottles down to the local shop & recycle them where you get a receipt for the "pant" which you can use at the shop as payment.
As kids we would often collect any cans or bottles we saw if there were any lying around, & we would recycle them & then buy sweets or magazines. It meant we had pretty clean streets & it really does encourage recycling. I wish more places did it tbh because it worked really well.
... I always throw the bottle caps away (I was told once in my childhood they were not recyclable I’m sure and I never thought to question it), and then recycle the actual bottle. I never once thought about removing the little circle thing and yet in retrospect that seems painfully obvious. Ahhh. 😅💀
in Germany, we actually have a system for recycling where every bottle costs 25cents extra and when you return the empty bottle, you get the 25cents back. it's only for liquids/beverages, but there it's mandatory for all plastic and glass bottles as well as cans, and has helped a lot with bringing up the amount of recycled packaging.
Thank you Hank, that was a great insight into an important topic I have thought about less than I thought I had:)
So glad you did this video and would love to see more of it. You talking about the value of a soda bottle reminded me of the book Beyond the Beautiful Forevers - some people collect plastic and get money for its recycled value and live off that money. Value is completely subjective.
It is had to understand how bad you are to reuse and recycle ind the US.
Where I live we have a small "pant/deposit" on every bottle that you get back when you return them. The glass bottles are reuse and the plastic is recycled.
We also have glass containers where all the glass without a "pant/deposit" can be delivered it is the sorted into more than 100 different types of jars and bottles.
Broken glass are remelted (It only takes 1/7 of the energy of creating glass in the first place) or it can be reused at glass wool if the quality is low.
I think there is a good case to make for glass vs plastic. plastic often end up en nature, it can be blown around by the wind, and it just feels like worthless waste, where as glass is not thrown away as much it might be due to the feeling of quality, stiffness or the weight but I see less glass in nature than I see cans and plastic bottles.
Also we need to remember that the packaging in some cases protect something that also to a lot over resources to make, thus in some cases the packaging might be ok.
The colors can actually also be used to protect the product, the dark wine bottles are used to protect the wine from sunlight.
Crash Course Enviommental Studies should cover this. How to reuse, recycle and when packaging is good or bad. Looking forward for that. :-)
out of curiosity, where do you live?
@@ambseyyy You probably already have a good idea of the approximations location, but I live en Denmark.
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This whole argument is fascinating, and makes me think about where I live, glass beer bottles are standardized like this. You get your bottle deposit back when you return them to a beer vendor, they collect them all, move them to a cleaning plant, then the beer makers put new product in the washed bottles. You are still paying for all the transport, but the bottles are reused many times. You can actually tell how many times a bottle has been used because they put a little dot of glass on the bottom of the bottle every time it's reused.
This video has largely made me realise JUST how completely useless the entirety of Coca Cola is. Like, I’d just love to ask the CEO of the Coca Cola company to give me one good reason for it to actually exist. Because clearly the fact that I love and get to drink Coke Zero and the company gets to make a huge amount of money is in no way worth the astonishing environmental cost.
Could you not say the same thing about the vast majority of entertainment? TV shows and movies have a large environmental cost as well, as does the running of the internet. Some of it is valuable to society, but a lot of it is unnecessary and just environmentally costly. But do I want the government to make superfluous internet use illegal? Definitely not
@@kevinwells9751 Absolutely, and I'm not even saying the Coca Cola company _shouldn't_ exist. It's just an interesting reflection of how extravagant a lot of day-to-day things are.
Coca Cola, as with every for-profit corporation, exists because we pay them to exist, and they do what they do because we pay them to do it.
If you're ever mad at a company for doing something (See: the memes about how 100 companies produce 71% of carbon emissions), just remember that companies will always and only do what we pay them to do. They're not moral agents of their own. They're aggregations of our consumer decisions.
Clearly our taste buds heightened sensitivity to sugars, and the pleasurable chemicals our bodies release to tell us we got the ripest fruit, are what drive the popularity of sodas. By purchasing fruits to quench this chemical desire we support farmers, and the actual plant life that maintains earth's livability for all species. Or we can succumb to the bombardment of merchandising propaganda and produce an existential garbage problem.
I was actually drinking Coke Zero while watching this video. A fountain drink out of a cup, so no plastic or glass that I know about, but still. I have mixed emotions about this.
As someone who worked as a lab tech in R&D for a sports drink company, the thickness of the plastic of the bottles is needed in order to hot-fill the bottles with the beverage. This takes out the sterilization step in the production line (which is also energy intensive) and makes it so that you don’t need preservatives in the beverage. So the weight there does have a bit more of a reason.
I'd never even thought about that aspect of glass 🤦
Same... I'm going to be saving and reusing glass containers from now on.
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glass is actually reasonably easy to recycle, it gets cleaned, sorted by color, crushed, then shipped off to be made into new stuff. generally the degradation is nearly non existent if sorted right.
plastic bags(and other thin plastic) are a huge issue though, even if they have the little #2/4 on them they can NOT typically go into the recycle bin as very few municipalities have the facilities to sort them out properly. you need to bring them somewhere that offers specific recycling for bags like a large grocery store. if they get recycled normally, they clog up the mechanisms used to sort the rest of the recycling. this can stop the lines several times a day while workers go and cut the plastic away by hand. it is actually better to throw them in the trash if you are not going to bring them to be recycled properly because that is where it will end up anyway, just with more work involved.
What's your source for glass being badd to recycle it's literally the only product we use that's 100% recyclable with no degradation
It's the fact that a glass bottle going into a landfill isn't bad, it's just silicon dioxide, and melting down a glass bottle to reuse it isn't any better then just creating new glass. When you recycle a plastic bottle you save them from having to pump crude oil, then do a bunch of work on the crude oil to turn it into plastic. So you save a lot of energy by recycling plastic, while glass saves barely any.
He didn’t say that he just pointed that glass need alot of energy in recycling and it’s not harmful to soil
My guess is that it just requires a lot of energy to melt it.
This is also my understanding.
The cost to sort and clean the bottles plus transport them back to a glass plant and melt it into new glass is significantly more than just melting new silica sand that's moved in bulk.
As a kid I made extra pocket money taking glass bottles back to the shop to collect the deposit you used to have to pay. I think the bottles were re-used rather than recycled. Also my mum remembers taking treacle and syrup tins to the shop to be refilled.
Great stuff Hank! Keep up the good work.
No punishment for dumping this video on Vlogbrothers.
This video is educational.
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I really love this! I am studying marine science, so I am super into plastics, waste management and how to make things more sustainable. I do weekly beach cleans and the sad thing is most of the products are avoidable. Once I saw the packaging for my favourite candy on the beach it hasn't seemed like such a necessary part of my life. Instead of buying soft drinks in plastic,glass or tin, I choose to make my own syrups from scratch- The raw ingredients like the sugar, lemons and ginger may still have the high carbon air miles, however at least the waste on my end is compostable. I know that I go beyond what most people are happy to do, but I don't want my career to be finding out how our previous actions have fucked everything up. Also, PLEASE DO A CRASH COURSE ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES IT WOULD BE INCREDIBLE!
i like getting products in glass, but only because I wash and use them as storage containers and drink ware.
I learned way more than i expected to from this video, especially re:glass. I always assumed it was easy to recycle because it's easy to clean and basically unadulterated (like, there aren't 4 types of glass in one bottle). I already reuse some glass jars but it's good to know i should make more of an effort to reuse or avoid it as packaging.
Hank: it's far too complex, it's impossible to actually grasp or really understand
Kurzgesaget: Hold my worm
CGP Grey: Hold my podcast
Crash Course: Ooh a new idea for a multi-episode subject!
This is the moment... that hank truly speaks from the bottom of his heart...! 14:12
So I was with you, but you lost me at the bottle design rant. Different bottle designs are not for marketing. Different products require different features for product preservation and filling. Vitamin water is sensitive to oxygen and requires barrier to protect the product. The purpose of packaging is to prevent food waste via better product protection. Does marketing get involved, yes, but they aren't the primary drivers of container design in most cases. Sprite is a carbonated beverage. Geometric design in both hot filled (vitamin water) and CSD containers, allows for those containers to be stronger with LESS PLASTIC. Nobody wants more plastic in containers except resin manufacturers (who do not control container design). Coke is not willing to pay for more plastic and the cost of shipping the additional weight just for marketing.
this. @hankschannel . Additionally, take a trip to a grocery store while they are stocking or a warehouse. A badly designed plastic container (AHEM, PANERA SOUPS WTF) will make itself known quite quickly and will be the bane of every worker there as well as the logistics people who have to deal with destroyed product.
Marketing is absolutely a factor, that's why so many of them have trademarked shapes instead of all the companies using one optimal shape for water and one optimal shape for carbonated drinks and one optimal shape for juice. Coke bottles aren't a different shape from Pepsi bottles because the products are different, they're a different shape because of marketing.
As a designer I can get behind the "Compete on the product not the bottle"!!! YES
What if we just recycle society?
Hunter Popkin that’s a high key mood right there
Best suggestion yet
i have been thinking over this for a few months now. has legitimately kept me up at night. thank you!
VOSS water, am I right
To be fair, I love those bottles. But I also reuse the sh!t outta them. Basically until the plastic cap breaks or degrades or gets gross.
It'd be awesome if we had standardized (glass) bottles - then you could have 3rd party businesses that make infinitely reusable caps instead of plastic ones.
Hank's concern about the leaving the tamper ring on the main bottle totally clicked in my head. In Germany (probably elsewhere in Europe as well but my main experience is in Germany), some manufacturers sell bottles where the tamper seal breaks only most of the way around, not the whole way around, so it still comes off with the rest of the bottle cap (Adelholzener water comes to mind, but others as well). It used to bug me because I'm used to having the ring leftover and not hanging off the bottle cap but knowing this makes a LOT of sense.
I love to hear Hank swear 😂
In Sweden we have a special system to encourage people to recycle bottles called pant (essentially ‘pawning’). Whenever you buy a bottle of something in Sweden, there is an additional cost of 1kr (just over 10 cents) which you get back if you recycle the bottle where you’re supposed to. It’s a decent system. In addition, at the recycling station, they give the option of donating your recycling money to charity.
Just to let you know, the title spells lifecycle wrong
In germany we do reuse glas bottles. We pay a deposit when buying any bottle (8-15ct) which you get back when returning the bottles.
There are two different systems when giving back bottles/cans.
Some are recycled (Einweg-Flasche or in englisch One-time-use-bottle) which are most of the plastic bottles.
Others are reused (mehrweg-flaschen or multiple-use-bottles) which are mostly beer and other glass bubbles. These are collected and then returned to the companies which then clean them and reuse them which is pretty neat I think.
All this information is just from the top of my head so more research might be needed but I really like the system as it has other benefits as well:
-Streets are cleaner as no one leaves empty bottles and if they do they are then collected and returned by homeless people for expample.
-it is a benefit for homeless people as they can collect the bottles and them "earn" money that way by collecting them
On the bottle thing: Everyone's cans already basically look the same already, and guess what? They're doing fine! The businesses have found ways to market that don't involve the SHAPE OF THE PACKAGE as much! Thanks for making me think about things in a way I've never thought about before.
The focus on the separating the plastic on the plastic bottles is interesting, because in Japan, they have a designated bag for the PET bottle, but you're expected to remove the label and the cap from that bottle before you recycle it (note: there are places where you just toss in the whole bottle still though). And all the Japanese bottles I've used don't have the soft plastic part in the lids, and the labels are easy to remove. It's intriguing how different countries and jurisdictions handle their recycling streams.
In countries like Japan and Germany there are strict rules on recycling where your trash might not be collected if you haven't sorted it properly. And here in Australia there are money incentives for returning cans, plastic and glass bottles to deposit stations.
It really shocked me when visiting the US to find that most Americans don't recycle. You're right that we definitely need to work on more solutions to get those numbers up to 100%.
All i can say is i wish more people "see this" (the point)....thank you Hank for the time & the thoughts!