
Drowning in plastic: Visualising the world’s addiction to plastic bottles - 80mph
https://graphics.reuters.com/ENVIRONMENT-PLASTIC/0100B275155/index.html
======
vanilla-almond
Will anything change? Take bottled water as just one example - mostly sold in
plastic bottles. Just look at this chart of bottled water consumption in
Europe from 2017. Good luck getting people to change their consumption habits:

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/455422/bottled-water-
con...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/455422/bottled-water-consumption-
in-europe-per-capita/)

~~~
2muchcoffeeman
You have to hand it to the bottled water companies. They pulled off what must
be one of the biggest cons in the world. First world countries with potable
tap water buying it in bottles with inflated prices because of reasons.

------
jacknews
Is this based on the volume of bottles, intact?

The amount of plastic is a small percentage of that volume - that 10-year
mountain might become a single office building of solid plastic.

And I believe PET is one of the more recyclable plastics. Certainly, in less
developed nations, it's collected, for profit.

In fact this is the real problem with plastic - whether it is collected
properrly, or left to wash out into the oceans.

If it's collected, even if it goes to landfill (we're not running out of land
to fill, and I believe landfills will become the mines of the future), it can
be very efficient in terms of 'usefulness vs environmental impact'. Perhaps
much better than many alternatives (eg cotton grocery bags). If it's left to
drift, it can be quite a problem.

IE We should be looking much more closely at material handling and life-cycle,
rather than focusing exclusively on materials themselves.

~~~
perfunctory
> The amount of plastic is a small percentage of that volume - that 10-year
> mountain might become a single office building of solid plastic.

A typical pedantic HN's comment. The point of the infographic is to draw
attention to the growing plastic pollution crisis. In 2050 there will be more
plastic than fish in the oceans [0]. Plastic is falling out of the sky in
Arctic [1]. Does it really matter if you count intact bottles or pure plastic
volume?

[0] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
mix/wp/2016/01/2...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
mix/wp/2016/01/20/by-2050-there-will-be-more-plastic-than-fish-in-the-worlds-
oceans-study-says/)

[1] [https://www.bbc.com/news/science-
environment-49295051](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49295051)

~~~
jacknews
Not at all

My point is that plastic COLLECTION is the issue, not the amount produced.

And wildly hyping the actual amount of plastic with dis-information-graphics
does not help the cause.

------
melling
When did we start drinking so much bottled water?

Must have been about 25-30 years ago I remember noticing it and wondering why
would I want to pay for water, it has always been free.

~~~
dredmorbius
Hint: Drinking bottled water was a subtle "they're gay" punchline in the film
_Heathers_ (1988).

[https://moviechat.org/tt0097493/Heathers/58c74f926b51e905f67...](https://moviechat.org/tt0097493/Heathers/58c74f926b51e905f6764540/What-
is-mineral-water)

Google's Ngram viewer shows a consistant uptick of print mentions since 1985:

[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=bottled+water&...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=bottled+water&year_start=1960&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cbottled%20water%3B%2Cc0)

And sales volume since 1996:

[https://douglashicton.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/bottlegrap...](https://douglashicton.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/bottlegraph.png?w=466&h=503)

For myself, until the mid-1990s, it simply wasn't a thing. I would
occasionally buy a bottle on road trips in the 1990s (I now carry a reusable
drink bottle, those are going on ten years' use for me).

If you view conference videos online, you'll note that pitchers and glasses in
earlier videos were replaced by plastic bottles later. Those are now starting
to disappear in some cases, though tetra-pack water also sometimes appears. An
interesting sort of incidental meta-commentary on late capitalism.

------
thelazydogsback
I just simply do _not_ get this at all. Why do people (a) pay for water which
(at least in the US, with some exceptions) even unfiltered has quality parity
with bottled water, and (b) not feel empathy for the damage they are causing
with the single-use container? It sickens me every time I see people by cases
of this stuff. AFAIAC, there should be at least a large tax or deposit charged
for these bottles.

