Glass is almost always the most environmentally friendly packaging for drinks. Aluminium needs a lot of energy to be recycled and can only be used once. I’m not sure how it works in the states but here in Germany we reuse our glass bottles up to 50 times.
pixeltree@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
Yeah here in the US no containers get reused as is, due to corporate lobbying from pre 1990. Aluminum also is less energy intensive to transport since containers weigh less! Both are infinitely preferable to plastic containers.
meekah@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Ahhh corporate lobbying is a beautiful thing. Halting progress to make sure the rich get richer! But thanks dor that explanation. Also a good point about Aluminium being lighter.
pixeltree@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
Aluminum also takes way less energy and is much cheaper to recycle than to produce new! I think roughly around 2/3rds of all aluminum ever produced is still in use because of that. Don’t remember the exact figure, just remember it from my material science electives from college
meekah@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
yeah, absolutely! I’m not trying to say that aluminium is a bad material. Just that it’s not the right choice as a drink container, at least once you convince the population to return bottles to the store (the deposit system here in germany works pretty well. when people don’t want to return the bottles, they put them next to the closest trash can, so homeless people can collect them and return them to the store for a small reward)