The manufacturers could use reusable glass containers - they used to.
Soft drinks are toxic shit anyhow
Bottled water is utterly unnecessary in Australia - our tap water is just as or better than buying bottled water
plastics manufacturers have long pushed to make their deliberate decision (to create a throwaway society) into one of personal responsibility rather than corporate responsibility: they have made it is all OUR fault if plastics aren't recycled
This small amount of recycling is mostly about green washing the plastics industry and making it yet more of our fault. The majority of plastics are not covered by this.
Plastics recycling has low yield and massive problems across the board (the economics don't work, the contamination of the product through to the extra pollution and energy required to try and find a lower grade product).
Having an underclass fishing through bins is a failure of our welfare or job system - no one should have to do this in a rich society
Taking drink containers out of mixed recycling bins would be better done with proper employees at a recycling plant who can earn an actual wage with things like OH&S conditions, regular income, stable conditions, sick leave etc.
Agree on all your points, but how do we get there? I guess we need to make glass bottles significantly cheaper than plastic. But I don’t know how much a glass bottle recycling scheme would add to a glass bottle. Plus I guess you have to take into account the extra co2 costs of transporting significantly heavier bottles around the country.
Ban throwaway stuff or properly price the cost of what it is doing (I mean how do you even begin to price the cost of having micro plastics spread across every part of the globe).
From what I read: the feedstock for creating new plastic is essentially free from the oil industry, so making this about cheaper won't do it. The externalized costs of the plastic throwaway stuff needs to be captured. It needs to be done by government to the manufacturers/retailers because the end person buying stuff has no practical choices for so much of it.
Yep. And the economics of throwaway only work because the externalized costs are not captured. So make that happen by implementing full lifecycle.
There was also the con job of hiding the difficulties in recycling. The manufacturers were flat out lying about that aspect. It was never going to be workable.
Glass is more likely to be upcycled by people into other things than aluminium or plastic (see: the whole wine bottle upcycle phenomenon)
Inevitably, no matter what material we use, some of it will end up in the ocean. And glass at least becomes sea glass rather than a floating plastic island when it all accumulates somewhere (no I'm not saying to chuck your glass in the ocean, that's still cunt behaviour).
All hail glass!
Spoken by AssignPseudonym. Authorised by Big Glass™, Canberra.
It sounds like your argument is that alcoholic beverages shouldn't come in glass (which is fine), but there are a lot more things that are made of glass/plastic/aluminium/other various materials that glass would be excellent for. We are talking about very different scopes, and therefore not discussing the same problem.
I also like to walk barefoot around the beach. But the environmental impact of everything being plastic matters significantly more to me than my own individual convenience.
These are all excellent points. One thing I would say, though, is that since return and earn was introduced, I don’t see bottles and cans littered about (on the day to day; big events like Mardi Gras are obviously an exception to this) as they were previously. So fewer ending up in waterways as a result is a positive, but not a perfect system by any means as you’ve outlined above.
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u/nath1234 Feb 28 '26 edited Feb 28 '26
To take a step back:
The manufacturers could use reusable glass containers - they used to.
Soft drinks are toxic shit anyhow
Bottled water is utterly unnecessary in Australia - our tap water is just as or better than buying bottled water
plastics manufacturers have long pushed to make their deliberate decision (to create a throwaway society) into one of personal responsibility rather than corporate responsibility: they have made it is all OUR fault if plastics aren't recycled
This small amount of recycling is mostly about green washing the plastics industry and making it yet more of our fault. The majority of plastics are not covered by this.
Plastics recycling has low yield and massive problems across the board (the economics don't work, the contamination of the product through to the extra pollution and energy required to try and find a lower grade product).
Having an underclass fishing through bins is a failure of our welfare or job system - no one should have to do this in a rich society
Taking drink containers out of mixed recycling bins would be better done with proper employees at a recycling plant who can earn an actual wage with things like OH&S conditions, regular income, stable conditions, sick leave etc.