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Comment by brohoolio | Hacker News Reader

Glass is a terrible idea because of litter. The beaches around here used to be unusable because of the amount of glass in the sand. Nothing like a kiddo screaming because of a chunk of glass in their foot to make you change your mind.

Higher deposit for plastic sounds good to me.

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Funny how bottles don’t break as much when they’re worth money intact

Yeah aluminum cans with deposits are extremely rare to see as litter

Being worth 5/10 cents? Of course. It seems the point is that if they were worth more (~$1) people would be sure to keep them to recycle

People also seem to forget glass bottles are very energy intensive to produce and recycle, 3.69 MJ for glass and only 0.21 MJ for a PET bottle.

The real answer is in giving people clean drinking water at the tap IMO, so many people use bottled water exclusively.

With some exceptions (e.g. Flint, MI) tap water is very clean already, cleaner than a lot of bottled water in some cases.

yep - but that doesn't do much good if people overwhelmingly /think/ otherwise.

Have you ever had tap water from San Jose, Los Angeles, or Las Vegas?

Vegas, yes. What was wrong with it?

Maybe we should also stop building cities in arid regions, expecting that remote water resources will keep feeding them.

Not to mention transportation energy. Glass bottles are ~40-50x heavier than plastic and plastic lined aluminum cans. At ~180 Billion cans per year that fuel usage adds up. It's not an accident or malevolence that plastic is so widely used, it is efficiency.

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