Would it be correct to say that the lowest hanging fruit for reducing production of plastic without outsize negative impact would probably be in stymying the vast quantities of synthetic textiles being sold, particularly to richer countries? Those materials dominate fast fashion and are one of the most common types of fabric across a broad range of products ranging from clothing to automobile seat covers to pet beds.
Packaging produces about 140 million tons annually. Textiles produce about 40 million tons. Construction produces about 75 million tons, and transportation about 60 million tons.
Textiles are non negligible, but packaging is almost certainly a better target for inexpensive impact. Tons of stuff doesn't need plastic wrapping.
Only a very small percentage of packaging ends up as micro or nano plastic in the water supply. A much larger percentage of textiles end up as micro or nano plastic in the water supply since they're generated by washing clothes.
If that's what you're concerned about, a focus on textiles is warranted.
I only see the paper backed ones with the small plastic panel never the full monty with the two plastic sides anymore. Maybe its taxed more or something in this part of the world.
I do live in one of the (if not the biggest) excessive packaging capitals of the world, so it might be that. Happy to hear they've moved away from it elsewhere.
There is no low hanging fruit when it comes to reducing plastic production or consumption. Plastic is just too awesome -- which is why we use it instead of whatever we used before plastics.
I'm not aware of any major use of plastic where going backwards in time is on-net more environmentally friendly. Most reports discussing plastic replacements make unreasonable reuse and durability assumptions. Often they ignore or downplay consequences of switching like increased transportation pollution or pollution from assumed recycling.
Even doesn't pass the smell test, especially if one considers the data for cotton shopping bags versus plastic.
Per unit length of netting with the equivalent strength, cotton/hemp netting will weigh more, require more frequent replacement, require horrible preservatives which will leach into the marine environment, require more fossil fuels to till and fertilize the cotton, consume more freshwater in production, result in more top soil loss due to mono-cropping, need more pesticides, etc.
Direct plastic pollution in the ocean would be reduced yes, but at the cost of higher pollution and environmental degradation elsewhere.
Maybe you're too young to remember the days of paper bags, hemp shopping bags, shoes and shirts.
"more environmentally friendly"? Most alternatives are more environmentally friendly in a long run than plastic.
Production of paper comes with many asterisks regarding environment friendliness [0]. It sure can be done, but it's not simple and the majority of the industry isn't "clean".
Hemp is only used a low scale so I don't think we have enough data on what would happen if tomorrow we decided to replace all the plastic bags with hemp bags and how we'd produce that. It's not guaranteed to be better until then.
Does any paper at this point come from old growth? I'd figure its new growth treefarms that produce paper. At which point, you can't exactly flip a light switch and expect a complex forest ecosystem that took a millenia to establish to restore itself on human timescales. And thats only if the existing landowners wanted to just say "we are content to not make any money ever again with this land"
- new growth is monoculture, and we're having health issues coming with it (Japan is trying to do something about its pollen problem, but not until two decades from now). It's also more fragile areas, including geologically.
- new growth also means the process that took centuries to build forests is not starting either.
- if the plan is to produce more paper (replace current plastic use with paper use) we can't just keep the current tree farms. It will be expanded and eat up on the legacy forest, as it needs the right niche to efficiently grow.
On the last point, if we were really good at farming new trees, we'd have tree fields not far from manufacturing centers. That's not the case, we're still relying on favorable places where forests used to grow, which doesn't bode well for further mass production in the future.
Seems like the manufacturing centers need to be sited on rivers with rights to pull from and with access to sufficient available power, and a way to distribute this product. Are all forests in such condition? Probably not. I've seen some of these forests, they are often in the middle of nowhere connected by dirt roads built by the logging companies. This is marginal land, sometimes leased by the US forest service. Prime land near rivers and power sources isn't going to be squandered when you can get a permit to farm on marginal land or buy it for cheap if its a private holding, just like how you don't see grazing near feedlots. Grazing needs more land, can be done on marginal land, and you can just ship cattle to feedlots elsewhere near meatpacking plants. As a result we graze cattle in places where you sometimes can't even drag a plow, and have feedlots near chicago where cattle can be processed in vast quantity and then distributed.
I will agree that monoculture is no good and neither is taking over virgin forest, but this isn't exactly the only industry on this planet that behaves like this either. Rather than trade paper for plastic we can instead consider how we protect virgin areas from any sort of development. Monoculture is also a risk for industry in the form of crop loss from disease, so I wouldn't be surprised if this begins to change in the future and we see more polycultures farmed, not just in trees either. So if there is a plastic ban favoring domestic paper products instead, as well as sufficient protections in place for existing virgin forest, you can probably expect the value of a tree farm to go up to the point where people who might be using their land for one thing being more inclined to farm trees on this land.
Paper can be made from reeds and cereal straws. However harvesting reeds will destroy bird habitat and straws are also used to feed livestock during winter.
And non-plastic bags last forever. The oldest grocery bag that I can accurately date is from before at least 2008 and I haven't had a single one wear out yet, so no idea how long they'll end up lasting. I don't know about hemp bags though, since I have a mix of cotton and linen bags myself.
It’s not though unless it’s reused a great deal. Making paper is intense and requires a LOT of water and chemicals.
We should really look for more lower hanging common sense solutions.
Let me give you one… the boxes that are used to transport food to a grocery store are all crushed and go back into the recycling system as bundles. Why aren’t we sending boxes that can be used in place of paper and plastic bags? It would immediately offset a lot of purchases that require bags.
Costco does it. Sam’s Club sometimes too. But manufacturers don’t make boxes designed for the purpose of a second use before recycling, and the vast majority of stores don’t offer it.
That would take a waste stream and give it a second use before being recycled.
Simple, common sense solutions like this one are all around us but we keep looking for a “solution” rather than an “improvement.”
No idea about the US, but I've seen European grocery stores heavily use Euro containers [1]. Empty ones are taken away in the same truck that brings new goods, so there's no extra cost in transportation either.
Costco doesn't use special boxes either. Grocery store uses the exact same case boxes as you would get at a costco checkout, they probably just aren't generating so damn many around the clock because the quantities sold are much smaller, leaving you with fewer extra boxes to have customers deal with on their own.
Whatever you do to producer, it will affect consumer.
Increase cost of production? Cost of product increases.
Decrease production output? Cost of product increases. (Assuming demand did not change)
Forbid a product? Consumer looks, for next best alternative which is pricier (if it was cheaper, it would have been the first pick).
Regulate prices? Output is reduced. To fill in the gap, consumers look for next best alternative, which is pricier (if it was cheaper, it would have been the first pick)
The only alternative is for consumer to stop desiring the product somehow. E.g by changing of definition of “good” via education, morals or religion.
You subsidize the production of the better thing. Once you have (within reason) a better or equivalent product at the same or lower price at the consumer point-of-sale than the alternative you want to replace go ahead and ban the old thing.
It doesn't work for everything but it's the exact playbook we followed for LED lightbulbs.
Good point. At least some times, there is other way, called “invent something better”. When it works, it can reduce price and reduce environmental damage both at the same time.
Trying to chase at least a tiny bit of “technically correct”: during subsidisation period, consumers are the ones paying for it with their taxes.
It's not (and is never) a question of being pro-plastic, or pro-paper, or pro any material really. You can't reduce the discussion about how to balance our civilization and the rest of the planet to a "plastic or not" question.
Plastic use is a tradeoff, removing plastic has side effects that need to be addressed. "0 plastic" is a marketing claim because it doesn't guarantee it puts us actually in a better place.
To take a simple example: let's say tomorrow we replace all the plastic in cars with metal. Would the manufacturing required to get that metal in place, and the additional energy needed as the cars get significantly heavier counter balance the amount of plastic that won't be released in nature ? I'd wager that no, that would be a stupid idea, even if it reduces plastic.
And there's an infinite number of other stupid ideas to reduce plastic. That's why "0 plastic" is meaningless, what matters is if there's an actual improvement, including keeping using plastic where we don't have better alternatives.
> "0 plastic" is a marketing claim because it doesn't guarantee it puts us actually in a better place.
It's only a marketing claim if it's used in marketing. It can also be a statement of fact... Plastic pollution and CO2 pollution are separate phenomena and we could theoretically achieve 0 plastic and that could be a genuine victory for the problem of plastic pollution.
Anyway I realize my initial statement came off strong. I want to be clear I'm not saying zero-plastic is the goal we should actually be pursuing. But "Net environmental effect" is so complicated as to maybe not even be measurable. Are we talking about extinction rate? Biodiversity? Cancer rate of wild animals? Ecosystem collapse?
Additionally - as many ways as there are to evaluate our effects on the biosphere, there are ways to address the problems. Plastic reduction doesn't have to mean 1:1 replacement; that would be shortsighted. Holistic societal changes are necessary, and I think we're actually both agreeing on that. E.g. don't replace plastic car parts with metal - get more cars off the road.
The easiest way would be to curtail the supply of oil, which is the raw input of all plastics and there is more of it being extracted than ever before. As long as there is a glut of cheap oil on the market, companies will find a way to make a profit while outcompeting companies that use natural products like cotton. The major ways we use oil all harm the planet in some ways.
Planet and nature will be just fine. Number of species bounce back after extinction events. As long as there is at least one ameba, life will find a way.
Humans on the other hand might have tougher time during each next century.
This is not a useful take and does not contribute to the discussion. Nature being reduced to "one amoeba" is not "just fine" according to any human value system. I don't understand this need to say "akshually the planet will be fine" just because someone used the phrase "harm the planet".
I would add that it is also not true that life will bounce back; Earth is 4.5 billion years old, the vast majority of which time it was inhabited by no more than microbes; and we have 1 billion years left before the sun boils the oceans. Humans are the first technological civilization the Earth has seen, and will likely be the last - there isn't time for another go-around.
Addendum: I googled "akshually the planet will be fine" and the top result was this[0] HN thread. Even has the "one amoeba" line. Is anyone working on some sort of platform that can crosslink parallel discussions so we don't have to have the same discussions over and over ad nauseam forever?
You can see they are inaccurate because cotton doesn't grow in many different colors. The bulk fabric may be 100% cotton, but the dyes implanted into the substrate are not counted.
The premium "not from concentrate" orange juices contain additives not required to be listed on the packaging.
Great value "natural flavor" chocolate syrup contains vanilin (artificial vanilla). So I guess the natural part only applies to the chocolate and not other flavors used.
Many "100% alpaca" socks contain other fibers too (elastics, etc).
The list goes on...
Edit: why disagree? You can even see stuff like "100% cotton with Scotchgard" or the sublimation process used on clothes. Want to share any evidence to the contrary or tell me why it's wrong?
The sublimation process on cotton clothes uses synthetics as the bonding base. It could be a polyester resin or a vinyl. The shirt itself will still be listed as 100% cotton.
DMEU is a synthectic bonding resin. but im not sure that by itself is in any way a problem. Are you talking about pattens that are sublimated onto cotton shirts?
In an ideal world, people would use natural and durable materials, mostly wood, glass, steel. Stuff that does not hurt living beings.
The acute problem is not plastic production, although that's an issue. But the industry invented the myth of plastic recycling, and due to wrong incentives, the plastic is shipped to poor countries where it comes into the environment.
The easiest way to deal with plastics is to collect it and burn it.
But those more durable goods have a cost in hydrocarbons as well, don’t they? Lot of energy input in a hunk of steel. Are we really saving any fossil fuel conversion by swapping over? Has anyone measured?
Actually plastics is the most ecological and economic way to package things. Nothing comes close. Because people throw things away all the time, and producing things out of cotton, wood, glass etc. takes way more energy.
The price of something usually reflects the energy needed to produce it. But it does not take account the externalized cost on the society and environment.
On the other hand, there are areas where other materials like cotton are only a bit more expensive but do not have such a negative effect on the environment. In those areas, like textiles, a ban on synthetic material is probably a good thing.
The problem with the environmental impact of plastics is not the production, it's where it ends up. So the question is how to incentivize keeping a closed system where plastics ends up being burned.
Minimizing the use of plastics requires a complete change of how the economy works. It would require a society of citizens, not consumers who throw away things that are still fine and there are certain areas where plastics can not be replaced by other stuff.
Forcing a cap on plastic production means hurting the emerging markets most but also the wealth in western countries.
“Where it ends up” is not a problem in the developed world. Everybody complains about it but there are zero problems with our landfills.
All the environmental degradation is in the developing world, where they… do not value the environment in the same way. We didn’t either when we were developing. It took a while.
But western advanced economies dispose of their trash well. It’s not even close to the top of our list in terms of what we could do for the environment. Seems to capture our collective imagination tremendously though. Maybe because of guilt for consumer culture, maybe because making a meaningful impact would hurt too much.
> “Where it ends up” is not a problem in the developed world. Everybody complains about it but there are zero problems with our landfills.
That's a total fiction. There is plastic trash in my yard right now which came from somewhere else. I don't even know where it came from; my entire neighborhood and the park downstream are littered with plastic trash almost year-round.
There's lots of plastics pollution in the west - including from tires, from people throwing stuff away, and from microplastics in the water.
It's just not visible immediately. But you can actually easily collect hundreds of kilograms of plastics next to a 1-2km long part of a road on the countryside.
Tires are a fair point, but kind of a goal post shift isn’t it? The problem with tires is not disposed tires, it’s tire wear.
If there’s a plan for remediating tire shavings over the course of tires wearing down in any of these threads I must have missed it. Please correct me?
As far as the rest it’s just not true. Landfills in the west are fine. Nothing is perfect but they’re not impactful at all ecologically. (Developing world not so. Lack of robust waste management contributes massively in the developing world.)
The European Commission is working on the new EURO7 standard for car emissions, which will include new standards and targets for tire (and brake) wear. I tried to find specifics and they don't seem to be publicly known yet.
But yes, I do expect significant progress on this in the next few years!
I don't want to move any goalposts, I completely agree with your previous posts. In some European countries like Germany and Switzerland, waste collection has been almost perfected, there's not much to complain. But we still have pollution related to plastic production.
It's the west who's shipping the plastic waste to Asia where it ends up destroying the environment and the health of people.
I’m specifically saying, in the US, we don’t do anything special with our trash. Mostly no recycling of anything but metal. We put it more or less securely in the ground and bury it. That’s all.
And that is fine. We would have to fix a whole RAFT of serious serious problems before landfills are anybody’s radar. We will never see it our lifetime and I hazard that we may never see the day.
Other countries have tighter land requirements and they might be more forward thinking, but the idea that plastic packaging is impacting the environment is just not supported by data.
As long as you’re not throwing it in the river, plastics waste just doesn’t matter much.
Yes. They dispose of it well... by shipping it in Asia.
Look up the whole scandal with plastic shipped to various places in Asia. Crap that even China considers impossible to recycle and refused to allow entry to.
Yes. This analysis has been done. And yes, it depends on your source of energy. But in general energy is getting cleaner, and eventually could be 100% oil free. Most plastics rely on oil, so there's a crossover threshold for most at some point.
The math really depends on if you insist on buying new everytime, or realize a stainless steel skillet you can find in the thrift store in your neighborhood can last another 3000 years.
The way to fix it is to find a material to replace it that’s cheaper and doesn’t have the downsides. We might be able to limit one time use plastic with government intervention, but not the global plastic industry. Call me a pessimist. But once you really dig in to all the places it’s used you realize a lot of the modern world wouldn’t exist without it unfortunately.
Plastics are one of the greatest, most versatile materials available. If you want to cap plastic production, every single industry and your daily life will be drastically affected.
There are exactly zero incentives for any nation to drastically limit plastic production. As with CO2 these policies will be implemented by many Western nations, while the many, densely populated countries, relying on cheap goods will take no serious actions. Plastic is just too useful.
I've heard that 80% of plastic pollutions in the oceans are from African big rivers being used as dumpsters and then flushing their yield to the sea.
Why TF are we supposed to limit plastic use in developed countries, often located deep inland, where our plastic has many orders of magnitude smaller chance of polluting the oceans, etc?
As I see it, plastic is too cheap to produce (no incentive to recycle it) and overproduced (lots of very low quality plastic goods that have to be frequently replaced; lots of things with unnecessary plastic packaging). A cap on production ought to go some way towards solving both problems.
Plastics can't be recycled. Even the best quality HDPE resins can only be down-cycled once, and are turned into pens, toys and other low quality plastics stuff you don't want to have close to food.
Plastic resins lose quality in every recycling process (impurities, residues, etc.), so during "recycling", pure new plastics is added.
Even in PET recycling - which is the most effective "recycling" process that exists - PET bottles only contain an average of 17% recycled PET and the rest is brand-new PET. PET bottles are only recycled one or two times.
Most of the "recycled" PET actually goes into other production, like films and textiles, because it's too impure. When plastic gets "recycled", it actually gets down-cycled into products that are no longer recyclable.
So what happens in the end is that the toxic plastics gets concentrated into products where the law does permit these toxins to be present.
Only organic waste and paper allows true recycling.
You have to understand that recycling is probably the most corrupt industry that exists. This is due to the broken incentives that go against all free market principles. Recycling companies are actually paid to process plastic waste. And then they are paid a second time when they sell it. And they still lose money, so they are paid a third time with direct government subsidies.
The plant has been just operating for a couple weeks and there exists no independent reports of what they produce. Lots of government money is flowing into this, creating incentives for corporations to keep trying. The industry may be able to force this through the sheer amount of government subsidies at one point, but this does not make it economical or ecological.
“Regular recycling is difficult enough, but chemical recycling causes even more problems,” Goldsberry said.
During her tenure covering the plastics industry, she said she encountered many advanced recycling project announcements that went silent after a year or so. “If they were making new plastics from co-mingled plastic waste through advanced chemical recycling, they would really be promoting it.
She said burning plastics for fuel is a more efficient and easier solution to the global plastic waste problem."
There are processes for “chemical recycling of plastics” that either convert polymers back to the monomer (pretty easy for styrene) or to mixed petrochemicals (such as pyrolysis). There are other problems, but the economics are always going to be tough for them because bulk plastic monomers and other petrochemicals (even fuels) usually cost about 50 cents a pound which is a hard price to beat even when you don’t consider the cost of gathering and transporting all that plastic.
The modeling uses a certain set of assumptions, and has a certain goal. As far as I can tell, neither were discussed in the article, making it difficult for me to _really_ conclude whether I feel the cap on production is justified. I realize my option doesnt matter, and the research papers probably do discuss the assumptions of the model. I don’t see why anyone should read this article though, unless you want another opinion piece
Force these corporations to deal with the plastic waste they make while generating their profits. They dont get to half do their job and walk away with the extra saved cash. No more externalization of costs.
We will even let them keep their profits from all the years of getting away with it. How generous!
I dislike getting poisoned by microplastics as much as the next guy, but a treaty like this decided by some global elite might have some unintended consequences. Like they always do..
This probably wont affect the average HN, but all of our food and medicine is using plastics for a reason. It is cheap, sterile and safe. If you're poor and the price of shippings/storing your food becomes significant more expensive then you'll even more screwed. Again, probably wont affect you or me, but these things always have bad unintended consequences.
I think at this point the unintended consequences argument has been overused.
There are significant intended consequences that implementing something like this would have. I order for this to be negative, the unintended consequences would need to be larger, and I think it's hard to see that happening.
Reading the article between the lines though, it seems like global coordination is required, and the biggest challenge is getting the top 5 producers in line (China not being mentioned by name/exact number feels evasive by the authors).
Plastic appears in a lot of "convenience" products which I wouldn't expect to be popular with the poorest people in the world. Plastic bottle of water? Convenient but not an efficient or reliable option.
And while you can probably find a "bad unintended consequence" for everything if you try hard enough, it's usually the case that these bad effects are far smaller than the thing we set out to achieve.
Plastic bottles of water are one of the most important supplies you can provide during and after a major disaster. There are so many situations that disrupt access to clean, safe, potable drinking water and pallets of bottled water are the simplest and fastest way to help people in need.
Having access to drinkable tap water[1] is an amazing privilege. Some places either don’t have access to enough water or don’t have the infrastructure.
I haven't been to asia, but I could imagine that plastic bottled water isn't a convenience good, but a way to avoid getting sick from polluted tap water.
My limited experience is in Southeast Asia and Mexico tourists used bottled water and natives do not, at the time I went ages ago it was the recommended behavior but the rivers in Southeast Asia had lots of what appeared to be single use containers, there was simply no larger cultural impetus to dispose of stuff properly. OTOH riding my bike around SF Bay Area there is always discarded fast food wrappers and packaging along paved roads, a few of us can’t be bothered even in one of wealthiest parts of USA.
You have filtered water delivered to your home or you drink bottled water. If you are away from your home and you need water, you buy a bottle. Everyone only drinks bottle water in Cambodia/Vietnam/Thailand unless you are so desperately poor that you have no choice but to get sick.
Exceptions abound, I'm sure, but it is a necessity not a luxury.
Boiling the water will kill any pathogens, but it doesn't do anything for chemical or disolved contaminants. If you're so poor you don't have a pot to boil water in you are desperate indeed.
I'd imagine a lot of these could be replaced with certain varieties of PLA that are sourced from bio-feedstocks and also relatively biologically degradable. Some PLA isn't very biodegradable, and certainly many would contain problematic plasticizers and other harmful chemicals. Additionally, PLA doesn't have the mechanical stiffness and toughness needed for many applications - but I think if the market for that expanded greatly, research investment would create new varieties of biodegradable PLA which could function as a drop-in replacement for a larger portion of other plastics.
Perfect example. Bottled water might be a luxury good for you, but in most places in the world you have polluted tap water you can die from or bottled water.
So if you were in charge of this, you might have just killed a few million people from cholera.
From what I've seen living in India, people in extreme poverty don't buy bottled water. They boil or filter tap water at home.
Middle-class and up people buy bottled water in restaurants or while traveling. I don't know anyone who drinks bottled water (aka Bisleri, the kleenex of bottled water in India) at home. Everyone has RO filters.
I have only seen people in North America buying bottled water for everyday, at-home consumption. I think it is very wasteful.
That's a false dichotomy though. Individual single use plastic bottles and cholera are not the only two options.
Paper packaging, metal packaging, glass packaging, bulk packaging, improved infrastructure, filters, etc. I'm sure there are other reasonable options beyond single use plastic bottles.
Well, if you're living in "Extreme Poverty", then you'll be earning around $2 a day.
If you're earning $2 a day, then paying $.2 more for bottled water in paper is probably going to be detrimental for you. Around 1 billion people live in extreme poverty.
So yes, there's alternatives for you and me, but not for a billion people.
A glass bottle has a unit cost increase of approximately a penny per bottle (per CleanMetrics). But the bottle itself can be reused and recycled.
Also, this assumes it's not in our best interest to subsidize this penny per bottle cost for our own health. Plastic trash ends up in our hydrocycle no matter where it is used.
Also, reusable plastic aren't the problem either. A large, centrally fillable 5 gallon container is not likely to be used once and discarded.
Are you really asserting that individual 12-40oz single use bottles of water are the best system we can imagine and what a million people use for daily water?
Paper biodegrades and can potentially be composted. If our ocean started filling with paper, existing biological systems would be able to address it.
Metal and glass are reusable many, many more times than plastic and are sterilizable with heat. Both metal and glass are recyclable or inert in the environment. If a bottle ends up in the ocean it eventually becomes sand again.
None of the above require oil to be produced.
I'm not saying plastic has no upsides, I'm saying other options exist that specifically address the downsides of plastic. With materials we are always making trade offs.
They can all be recycled in a much more meaningful way than plastic. Paper can biodegrade. Empty metal and glass bottles are easy to use as raw materials.
Yes but they're heavy and generate CO2 from transportation.
During communism we used to recycle all food and drink glass containers, but one would only get a few glass shapes and a few jar shapes. They only took back the containers clean and without labels. Most of the work was washing off the paper labels and bone glue. Kids were earning ice cream money doing the cleaning and recycling.
You can, and often do, reuse plastic bottles. Water dispensers are very popular in some places and they use recyclable 19l plastic bottles. Glass is just too heavy and fragile for transporting water and if I understand correctly metal still needs plastic lining so that it doesn't react with fluids.
I would have expected the cost of aluminum cans to be an order of magnitude more than plastic bottles, but from some quick searching it appears it's not even double.
I guess that fact sheet needs to be updated with your important revelations about how magically if they just have enough plastic bottles they'll solve cholera.
And to think all this time we'd been worried about the safe drinking water and didn't realise that without enough plastic bottles it's all a waste of time.
A HUGE % of plastic production worldwide is from bottlers of Coca Cola company drinks and their competitors. Why not address and deal with the elephant in the room.
The solution has been figured out by the company decades ago. The drinks are concentrated a massively and only mixed and the bottler, which is also the biggest plastic polluter on the planet. Have reusable containers people can buy from the company if they want to and set up dispensing machines at any location. Even better - rent those containers to the customer when they buy the drink and charge if they don’t return the container. But the logistics of all of that worldwide are more expensive than making ferrying and polluting with plastic. Move the bottling to the edge - to the consumer.
I think the challenge here is maintaining carbonation. Soda I buy already in bottles and cans maintains carbonation for years. Soda bottled into reusable containers lasts a couple days at best. I suspect in many cases the soda would go flat prior to consumption resulting in more wasted resources.
Ok, but why not use glass instead? That's even lower. With cans you'll still end up with microplastics and chemicals leaching into the soda. You still have the potential for microplastics in the environment even if it's 50% since one side is coated (surface area might be a large factor compared to overall mass if most particles are shed from the top layers. I don't know).
Yeah, I'm not really up to speed on how plastic turns into microplastic and how that might work with coated cans either, but it's a fair question to ask.
I think one argument against glass is the transportation cost (dollars or carbon, take your pick) on a grams of packaging to grams of product basis. Plus the added volume of both the glass and the packaging required to keep breakage manageable, which is volume that isn't being devoted to product either. A case of wine is 6^H (edit: can't math) 9 liters of wine, whereas a 24 pack of beer in 350ml cans is 8.5 liters is less overall volume and mass.
It seems insane to me that you can get a glass bottle of wine from another hemisphere for a single-digit or low double digit number of dollars. Just melting the sand to make the glass seems like it should cost a couple bucks.
It's possible they're reusing the bottles instead of melting them down. That's what was done a long time ago, and isn't an option with plastic or metal cans.
I can see how shipping could be more especially if it needs a cardboard case. Perhaps shipping would be negligible if we had more localized production and less long distance shipping. Rail shipping would likely have a negligible shipping cost difference. Even something like increasing the use of concentrated syrups and fresh made sodas could be a benefit for packing reduction and shipping costs.
