I imagine all plastics will be out of the question. I’m wondering about what ways food packaging might become regulated to upcycling in the domestic or even commercial space. Assuming energy remains a $ scarce $ commodity I don’t imagine recycling glass will be super practical as a replacement. Do we move to more unpackaged goods and bring our own containers to fill at markets? Do we start running two way logistics chains where a more durable glass container is bought and returned to market? How do we achieve a lower energy state of normal in packaging goods?
PLA (polylactic acid, commonly used for 3D printing) is made from biomass, and is thus sustainably sourced.
Bio-PET is functionally identical to petroleum-based PET, but is readily produced from plants, and is thus sustainably sourced.
I don’t think energy is a particularly scarce commodity. We are utilizing only a tiny fraction of the energy readily available to us. We haven’t even picked the low-hanging fruit of energy production yet.
We gave up on reusing glass bottles in large part because they were not sanitary. Every boomer has stories of finding cigarette butts in their soda and beer. Previous buyers regularly used their empties as ash trays before turning them in for the deposit, and the cleaning process was not nearly as effective as one would hope.
A better cleaning process would be needed to even consider commercial reuse of consumer glass today. Superheated steam, for example, would burn off pretty much any organic material, and machine inspection would be able to identify remaining contaminants and defects.
I live in a county that almost religiously reuses glass bottles and have never heard nor experienced such a story. Seems like someone figured out how to sanitize them.
We gave up on reusing glass bottles because the return payout never rose to match inflation. It was a nickel in 1960, that’s be 50 cents now!
It had to be that much because otherwise it didn’t make sense for people to actually return the bottles to the local pickup spot or drive them a few dozen miles from that spot to the local bottling plant.
As bottling moved away from washing and reusing glass, it became more centralized and switched to a medium more suited to centralized distribution, plastic. Now it really doesn’t make sense to return bottles and drive them hundreds of miles back to the national bottling plant.
“Sustainably sourced” doesn’t always mean “environmentally sustainable”. Unfortunately a lot of bioplastic still isn’t biodegradable and will leave us with the same waste issue as regular plastic.
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590332220303055
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Correct, which is exactly why I specified “sustainably sourced” rather than “sustainable”.
However, I would argue that biodegradability is not particularly desirable, and that we should be focused on carbon sequestration. A kilogram of carbon, locked up in a polymer matrix and buried in a landfill, is a kilogram of carbon that is not contributing to climate change or choking turtles.
Biodegradability should only be considered a benefit when the material is intended to be released into the biosphere, such as when flushed down a toilet. Biodegradable materials in a landfill decrease the effectiveness of that landfill as a carbon sink by (slowly) degrading into methane.
We gave up on them because they are less good looking. It’s dead easy to sanitise glass. You can do it chemically, thermally, or radiologically (with UV through to gamma rays).
Your quote ended before this:
It is certainly easy to sanitize clean glass that you have controlled from mold to filling with product. It is a little harder to reliably sanitize glass that the occasional customer has used for their own purposes.
When a narrow-necked bottle has been used as a smoker’s ashtray - or an addict’s sharps container - it is not “dead easy” to “sanitize” that bottle. Our cleaning process needs to be able to deal with such “contaminants”.
It’s trivial to automatically recognise and reject contaminated bottles. They differ in appearance and mass
Both glass and plastic bottles frequently get reused here in germany. Can’t say I’ve ever heard of someone having an unclean on. I don’t know where you heard that from but it’s clearly outdated or flat out bullshit.
What is the low-hanging fruit of energy production?
Renewable sourcing is nice, but that doesn’t really address the main problem, which is what happens to the plastic after you’ve used it. If it’s burned, it will release the previously stored carbon into the atmosphere. If it’s recycled, the carbon stays in circulation. If it’s biodegradable, it solves the plastic problem for the most part.
“Biodegradable” and “burning” release the same mass of carbon into the environment. Burning releases it as CO2. Biodegraded plastic releases that carbon as methane.
Biodegradability is not a desirable property of trash bound for a landfill.
Actually it depends on how it decomposes. Anaerobic processes tend to produce methane, whereas aerobic ones usually produce CO2. Anyway, I was mainly thinking of the microplastics though. Biodegradable plastic wouldn’t stay in a harmful form for thousands of years, but it would still produce carbon in some form.
We could easily use AI nowadays to identify trash in glass bottles at record speeds. Hell, there are models out there identifying cancer in cells right now.