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Comment by haccount | Hacker News Reader

A bottle of wine by mass is ballpark 50% glass and 50% wine. A one liter glass jar of olives around 300 grams of glass.

So it's not merely packaging cost but also about convenience of shipping it around.

That said we still manage to ship both of those all over the world despite the unfavorable mass and relative sensitivity of their packaging.

The jar of olives however have plastic liner in the jar lid, so you're not escaping plastics anyway. The solution as I see it is to use the right plastics in the right way and ensure proper disposal of the waste.

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Wine and olives also cost more than milk and eggs. You can package milk in glass bottle 5 percent of the weight of the product made at thousands of degrees from burning fossil fuels or you can package it in an inert HDPE container, that is processed at several hundred degrees and weighs say 0.5% of the product contained within. lighter packaging means less fuel burned to ship it. Lower processing temperatures means less fuel burned to make it. Ethylene polymerized into plastic for milk jugs doesn't end up in the air as CO2. Plastic feed stocks directly compete with fuel feed stocks. The less fuel we need to burn to ship things the more carbon is kept out of the atmosphere and the more carbon made into plastic that is stable when buried for thousands of years the less ends up in the air. You can make a lighter foam egg carton for less cost, that better protects the eggs than a paper one. Paper is no more a natural material than plastic. The manufacturing process releases hydrogen sulfide, contaminates water and when the paper rots the toxic dyes in ink printed on it is unbound and free to leach into the environment. Paper cups are coated with persistent waxed and plastics that migrate once the cup that supported them is gone. White paper products are bleached and brown paper is produced with harmful chemicals including even flame retardants at times. What is cheapest, lightest and most stable is usually also the most environmentally friendly thing.

Maybe go for the low-hanging fruit first, so to speak. When I was a free range kid back in the late 70’s, long before CA Redemption Value was conceived, all soft drinks were in deposit bottles. Thick, heavy reusable bottles. You’d pay a dime for the bottle and yeah you brought it back. The truck would go back to the warehouse with a load of empties. The retailer sorted them by brand and flavor. The bottling plant washed them and refilled them. Way more ecological than our current “pretend to recycle” regime we have in the U.S.

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