Is Plastic Better Than Glass?

The other weekend on a visit home I went out to a restaurant with my family for dinner. I have a bad habit of drinking soda for dinner when I go to restaurants, so my brother and I usually order our favorite soda root beer. This time they came in the glass bottles they were originally sealed in (IBC root beer to be exact). I was not surprised, because this is not the first restaurant I have been to that serves glass bottled root beer. However I have noticed that root beer is probably the only soda that is ever served in a glass bottle at restaurants. Let’s face it; most beverages have made the transition from glass to plastic. Coke no longer uses its classic glass bottles as seen advertised in those cute polar bear commercials we all know and love. There is no more milk man who delivers your milk in glass bottles at your door step, and takes the old ones to be used again. Now we have to go to our local Stewart’s gas station or supermarket to pick up a couple of giant plastic gallons of milk to last for the week to fill up those bowls of inviting unhealthy cereals made of corn before school. Yes, beer is still sold in bottles, but far more in cans, and even in most major stadiums, parks, and venues have beer companies made the change to plastic. In the distant past, the glass deposit soda bottle was the only kind of soda bottle available. Plastic bottles are an environmental travesty doing a great job polluting our environment as well as causing health risks. Glass milk bottles were delivered, taken back by the milk men when empty to be washed and sterilized, then used once again. Plastic cannot be sterilized, but sure they can be recycled, at least the ones that actually end up in recycling bins. This is supposed to be the eco-friendly thing to do however they can only be turned into another bottle once. ‘Eco-friendly companies have made efforts however to expand other uses for recycled plastic bottles including transforming them into things such as: plastic lumber, garden supplies, pallets, crates, plastic pipe, kayaks, school lunch trays, park benches, railroad ties, carpet, and fiberfill for clothing, pillows and sleeping bags,’ according to Earth911.com. I came across a very comical and simplified, yet vivid excerpt written by Jules May of the cycle of a plastic bottle. Here it is…

““I’ve got to load them into the back of my car and drive (carbon … carbon) to the dump, where they’re put into a skip. Then a lorry comes along, picks up the skip, and drives (carbon, carbon) to the docks where the bottles are poured into containers and loaded onto a ship which steams halfway around the world (CARBON! CARBON!) to China, where they all get “recycled”.
You know what happens in China? There’s actually not much of any use that you can make out of waste plastic – it’s no good for food, so you can’t make new bottles out of it – so half of it gets burned right away on huge, stinking bonfires – so there goes our clean air. The other half gets shredded, drawn, and eventually rendered down into clothes (fleeces, blankets, and so on), loaded back on a ship, and sent (CARBON! CARBON!) back here, so we can wear our garbage.
And when our garbage clothes eventually wear out? What then? We throw them away (because not even the Chinese can think of anything to do with old woollies). It goes into landfill (because, remember, you can’t burn it). And says there for – you have been listening, haven’t you? – 24,000 years! Did you know that 75% of non-biodegradable landfill is clothes? So it ends up as landfill anyway, in spite of all that transportation and processing.”

This never really hit home to me until I came to college and became a member of the Medical Fraternity. Every semester as a group we go door to door in downtown Albany asking for clothing and non-perishable items that we will donate for them. Surprisingly on such short notice people out of the goodness of their hearts manage to gather up a good amount of items. This past Saturday morning, after about three hours only, out of curiosity we counted up how many articles of clothing we collected which came out to 913!!! Walking door to door we only made it to a couple of neighborhoods. It is amazing how wasteful humans are, and especially in this case how much clothes we must go through and dispose of globally. Plastic bottles are definitely a convenience. They are lighter cheaper to deliver and truck, and not breakable; But even to create plastic, petroleum, our precious and quickly depleting natural resource, is being used not to mention the toxic chemicals that come from them when being disposed. If you ask me plastic bottles need to go. How much are we willing to lose for convenience, apparently money still has a chokehold on the well being of our planet and ultimately our lives.

References

• Article 1

http://earth911.com/plastic/plastic-bottles/what-happens-next-to-plastic-bottles/

• Article 2

http://julesmay.wordpress.com/2007/10/02/why-recycling-is-bad-for-the-environment/