By Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Americans use four million plastic bottles every hour but only about one bottle out of four is being recycled.
This is just another proof that plastic bottles, whether they contain water, soda, or whatever else, are simply not sustainable and never will be.
However, the weirdest thing is that even some greenies say that plastic is better than glass, as, being lighter, plastic bottles have smaller carbon footprint when it comes to shipping. But that is also the only time they may win.
As far as I am concerned let's cut that crap – pardon my French – and look once again properly at the glass bottle and not from the point of recyclability. That is not the point and issue. Let's look instead at reuse and return for reuse, and let's also, as during WWII, all bottles and jars in that.
Curbside recycling, in many places in the UK, as far as I have seen, is but a farce and a sham. When all colors of bottles and jars are dumped in the same hopper then that glass, now broken and mixed, either goes into landfill or, if we are lucky, to be ground down into road building “sand”. That is a waste on both counts.
Until broken a bottle or a jar can be reused again and again ad infinitum and unless they are broken they should not, ever, go for recycling. Instead they should, as used to be the case, go back to be cleaned and refilled. It has been done before and must be done again, and it must be done NOW.
Every time that we deliberately break a bottle or a jar to be recycled we waste raw materials and energy that were used to make that bottle or jar.
Now we have also ended up with supermarkets, such as Sainsbury's, who decide, claiming it to be a “green” move, to put all their peanut butter now into plastic jars. Better for the environment, they claim, as lighter than glass jars. Real truth... better for them as far as transportation costs go. Nothing green about it.
We seem to have gone mad...
© 2011
