Honest question about glass, from someone who also wants glass everything:
If we swapped back to glass containers for everything, would there be significant increase in CO2 emissions from the added shipping weight?
If we swapped back to glass containers for everything, would there be significant increase in CO2 emissions from the added shipping weight?
Fuji water bottles are rectangular not only as a unique branding but in order to economize on space in shipping to reduce transport cost.
Large lightweight items cost a lot to ship because they are lightweight and inefficiently use the vehicle. The ideal truckload is a full volume at the maximum carrying weight.
So, compared to transporting loads of compacted glass shards, I'd expect that transporting truckloads of empty bottles could be not only high in monetary costs, but also CO2 costs.
It's Fiji and this is a terrible example. Fiji could just ship a tanker full of water to a bottler in their country of destination. Instead they ship the bottles to Fiji, then fill them at a plant that runs on diesel generators. Finally, they ship the filled bottles to their final destinations.
I don't think its unreasonable to think energy use is lower for reusing rather than making new glass containers, since you would transport them anyway. The tough question would be whether energy use is lower for transporting and reusing glass rather than transporting new, lightweight plastic. I'm also for all glass everything so I won't try to tackle that problem. -- [1] https://nyti.ms/2GDAzD8
You're looking at total generation, but you really need to look at how increasing demand over time is met, since that's really how marginal increases from changing usage (like switching to electric cars) is met.