this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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Being an old man this really gets me. I love the internet and the way computers today but there is a whole lot that worked fine before plastics were so common. Almost nothing in the grocery store had plastic and everything was pretty much as convenient as nowadays. Sure you had to pay a deposit on the glass bottles but you got it back when you returned them.
That's still the way it works in Denmark, but with plastic bottles too. Something like 98% of all bottles are recycled.
If I had to choose glass or plastic, I am always choosing glass. Glass is such a good material. It is infinitely recyclable, the bottles can be reused for several years, and if they are buried they don't release microplastics.
I jump for situations where the glass is taken back for wash and reuse. Its the most sensible thing. I swear I had heard about restaurants doing this with containers but I never actually encountered one. So they had perm togo containers they took back and washed.
That's what we have here in Czechia, it is called Rekrabička.
It depends on which aspects of the environmental impact you're looking at, as melting glass to recycle it can be much more damaging than landfilling several plastic bottles if the glass furnace is heated by fossil fuels. If glass bottles are washed and reused, they're much better than plastic, but that's rarely what happens.
Gas is used to heat up glass furnaces most of the time. But it is possible to use elctricity aswell, which is more and more sources from either solar or nuclear.
Not saying it is greener than plastic when it comes to electricity and shipping.
The cleaning was common back then. Every store took back the tall glass bottles of soda and in modern times oberweiss brought that back with milk. The glass melting is nice just as a final option really.
That's reuse, not recycling. Glass is much more suitable for reuse than plastics as it's longer-lasting and can withstand temperatures hot enough and cleaning agents strong enough to ensure it's food-safe after being collected, but you need quite a bit of infrastructure to get the bottles back to the company whose products they're for. At least for the parts of a bottle's life that the manufacturer's responsible for, it can be much cheaper to make fresh plastic, and if they can externalise the environmental cost of disposing of a plastic bottle (i.e. blame the consumer), it can look better for their carbon footprint etc., too.
yeah I was not limiting my comment to recycling just about how we don't really need to be using plastic everywhere and how things were pretty fine in the 70's where you only saw plastic in a few use cases.