Coke Putting Dasani Water in Cans Amid Backlash Against Plastic | Hacker News Reader

Coke Putting Dasani Water in Cans Amid Backlash Against Plastic

bloomberg.com

Purely a PR move based on false perception. Cans have a plastic coating inside!

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/is-the-can-wor...

Like PV panels mounded on cars, its the first impression of uneducated masses that counts.

Also packaged water is so incredibly wasteful, pointless, and foul tasting that I can’t see it as anything but a PR move.

Careful having extreme stances on things. Packaged water keeps many people alive during times of natural disasters or crises. Volunteers flock in and one of the first items brought in is bottled water. It was a lifeline for many people during the Flint water crisis. Finally it serves an overall utility of giving people another choice at the vending machine. It sounds silly to you and me as well, but it has a real impact on public health.

It’s a fine choice if your local water source is truly not potable, but for the vast majority of the western world that’s not the case. On the contrary, the majority of tap water that people can drink for effectively free is of higher quality and testing standards than most bottled water.

The FDA website says the exact opposite. The standards for bottled water are much higher than municipal tap.

https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/bottled-water...

Not quite. From that link:

> Each time EPA establishes a standard for a contaminant, FDA either adopts it for bottled water or finds that the standard isn’t necessary for bottled water.

> In some cases, standards for bottled water and tap water differ. For example, because lead can leach from pipes as water travels from water utilities to home faucets, EPA has set its limit for lead in tap water at 15 parts per billion (ppb). For bottled water, for which lead pipes aren’t used, the lead limit is set at 5 ppb.

So it could go in either direction though leans toward tight coordination. Enlightening to know there is more scrutiny there.

That aside, the horrible taste alone should be enough to dissuade people with a known safe alternative from drinking bottled water.

Of course it is!

Just like the water in the “milk” cartons.

They might as well just sell water like Canadians sell milk —in simple plastic bags and then you put the bag in your favorite mug or whatever.

Selling water in plastic bags is actually a common practice in India. This happens in bars and when you order to-go (or parcel as it's called there)

Also in the Philippines.

It's super thin layer of plastic Likely dramatically less plastic compared to a plastic bottle

It's less plastic but it still emits BPAs into your drink.

That's a separate issue though

So the plastic lining inside the can (1) uses as much plastic as a plastic bottle and (2) is as damaging to the environment?

Since the answer to both of those questions is no, it's more than a PR move.

I think this is a campaign against people refilling their water bottles.

Interesting! I wonder if that's a big problem for them.

I tend to lose fancy water bottles, so I buy what are nominally single-use bottles and just refill them. I'm sure I get 10-20 uses out of them on average. But I figured my behavior is rare enough that it doesn't matter to the people selling the water.

We do exactly the same, usually get Pump bottles (https://cdn0.woolworths.media/content/wowproductimages/large...) or similar. Then throw them out when they start to get manky, and if one gets lost then it's less of a big deal.

I usually get a drink in a sturdy glass bottle and use that a couple of weeks —inevitably the cleaning staff think I forgot to toss it... so I buy another Hubert’s.

I do the same. I buy Powerade in Flo cap bottles and reuse them to keep water in the gym. It is ideal to quickly open without another hand and can be closed by a quick pat (as opposed to screwing the cap back on). And if I lose it - no big deal. I usually use them for many months and even eats before they break (usually at the seams) or get lost

It depends on hand size, but you can open water bottles while holding them with one-hand, hold the cap between your thumb and index, and then re-screw without using a second hand.

Those steps take longer, but you get a lot more flow when it's open. And you can do something else during the uncapping/capping process.

Same. I used to use and sometimes still miss a fancy thermos bottle, but I found it's just easier to use a new bottle every day and refill it two or three times than to worry about cleaning a thermos. I had the rather unpleasant experience of falsely believing a bottle that only contained water could go a few weeks without washing and then noticed black mold in it.

I don't advise re-using a single-use plastic water bottle. They typically have a ton of plasticizers that will come out as you flex the bottle.

I don't necessarily feel the same about other single-use plastics -- it's the thin crumple ablebottles that are dangerous.

Naw, it’s the first drink when most of the weakly attached plasticizers leach out while sitting for weeks/months.

Your daily refill has minimal dwell time.

This was my mom when I was growing up.

Ah, the smell of melting plastic bottle caps in the dishwasher.

I don't wash them between uses... They're usually sitting in the fridge/freezer in an internal bath of municipally chlorinated water.

I can buy liter Nalgene bottles for about $4 and get a few thousand refills before losing or breaking them.

I agree that fancy water bottles can be frustrating when lost, but there’s still really cheap bottles that last a long time.

I do the same with glass soda bottles. Unfortunately not as useful since you can't reseal it, but handy for having water at my desk at home and at work.

Are you saying a large corporation would rollout a measure that makes them money and blame it on demand from the consumer?

(nods head)

You can refill the aluminium bottles in the picture.

Just drink tap water. It’s time to end this bottled water madness.

And if you only have a sketchy water-source available, you can disinfect it by putting it in a plastic bottle in full sunlight for 4 hours.

Oh shit.

Try a glass bottle, perhaps?

The glass blocks too much UV.

Headline from 2050: "Coke proposes new, environmentally friendly system to pipe bottled water directly to consumers' homes"

Genius!

I think this is a great idea. And why not glass? It worked in the past. Glass bottles still work in many countries.

Why not use fountain water taps and your own stainless steel bottle or glass bottle?

Can't throw those in the freezer.

Can't throw these in a freezer either tho

Plastic water bottles? Why not?

The Dasani cans.

Because once, when I did that, the water turned black within a matter of hours for unknown reasons.

In a glass or steel bottle?

Glass, refilled with initially clear water from a public drinking fountain.

A quick web search says that may have been due to manganese in the water, which turns black when it oxidizes.

I guess it could work if You never leave the university's campus.

If only water coolers existed outside of universities...

It always amazes me the way people can't live without a water bottle in their hands.

You're not crossing Death Valley on a mule. You're riding to the mall in an air conditioned SUV.

Drink before you go. Find a water fountain. Heck, slurp out of the neighbor's garden hose. Why are people so fragile these days?

I say this as a guy who drinks from his garden hose: plenty of public water fountains are disgusting and I don't want to touch them.

A lot of people think public water fountains are gross because they don't understand them or how they work.

I once read a pretty good magazine article explaining that public water fountains are generally cleaner than most office water coolers. I don't remember all of the details, but in essence, it's because they are regularly inspected by professionals, and the water moving though the pipes to get to the fountain and then through the spigot reduces the chances of contamination. Unlike your office water cooler where the water sits around forever. We have to have a guy come out to de-funk our office water cooler every three months.

Amazingly, people have drunk from public water fountains for thousands of years and been just fine. Spend some time in Rome and watch hundreds of thousands of people drink from tens of thousands of public water fountains all day long, and amazingly the city hasn't been wiped out by the cooties.

Where do you live that just has water fountains everywhere? And is simultaneously practical to drive an SUV everywhere?

America.

Unless the glass is directly recycled (collected, washed and refilled with the same product) they are much more energy intensive than plastic or aluminium to produce.

The numbers I've seen say that glass uses less energy than plastic. 100% recycled aluminum beats glass, but a more realistic mix, or virgin aluminum, uses more energy than glass.

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/what-is-the-embodied-energy-...

Glass uses less energy per kilogram by a factor of 3 or so, according to your source. But plastic bottles use an order of magnitude or two less material, so still use less energy per bottle.

I think a lot of people are Ok using more energy to recycle glass (if true), instead of having trillions of pieces of plastic filling up the planet.

I doubt that selling Dasani water in aluminum cans in the Northeast US is going to move the needle on global plastic pollution, with the entire US accounting for less than 1% of plastic pollution (below countries such as North Korea and Algeria [1]) despite having 4% of the population and 24% of GDP.

[1] https://www.iswa.org/fileadmin/user_upload/Calendar_2011_03_...

Breaks down better when it escapes into the environment than plastic does.

Because glass is a lot heavier than aluminum and there's way more loss due to breakage.

Cans lined with plastic, but on the inside so consumers dont notice.

Is there less plastic though (due to the rigidity provided by the aluminum)? Also, does the plastic typically separate from the metal and get into the environment, or does it stay with the metal until recycling (in which it gets burned away when the can is melted)?

iirc, the backlash against plastic bottles isn’t due to the environment as much as it is due to the water containing micro plastics from the water bottle, which has various health consequences when consumed frequently enough.

>Beverage giants are under pressure to boost recycling and cut down on plastic that’s filling the world’s oceans and waterways. Aluminum cans generally contain more recycled material than plastic bottles and are less likely to float away in the ocean.

The featured article seems to suggest that it's because of the waste created by plastic products, and not the health effects of microplastics

Don't want to scare the unaware public, when trying to push a new paradigm where using a less scary reasoning might work. Especially when targeting a demographic with too much money (Dasani is more expensive than a generic).

If you choose metal containers because you think plastic is bad, remember that all aluminum food and beverage cans have plastic liners which usually contain BPA or other endocrine disruptors.

"Based on FDA’s ongoing safety review of scientific evidence, the available information continues to support the safety of BPA for the currently approved uses in food containers and packaging."

https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/bisphenol-...

I hope you don't mind if I believe the FDA over a bunch of rumors spread by the same internet know-nothings that brought back measles.

BPA in infant formula and bottles is banned for safety reasons in the EU and Canada. So, would you mind if I believed the European Comission or Health Canada instead? Even in the US, BPA is not permitted in infant formula and bottles in an industry-voluntary way that avoided the FDA making an explicit safety judgment on the levels of BPA present in the containers. The CDC warns against storing breastmilk in BPA-containing plastic.

BPA is not the end-all be-all of endocrine disruptors, of course: there are other classes of compounds banned in most of the developed world with solid evidence of harmful effects, like phthalates. It would be useful to check various established OECD health authorities and reputable research before dismissing the danger of endocrine disruptors as "rumors spread by know-nothings".

Would this be true of a water can? I understand the necessity for something acidic, but water?

And if still true for water, hydrolysis will be slowed at a neutral pH.

The irony here is that Dasani is just treated municipal (tap) water, not spring or melt water.

New amazing concept: Put water in a re-usable water. Drink. Repeat.

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