Episode:
13
Plastic sucks! So let's put everything in glass... right? What's better; glass, plastic or aluminium?
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We are back! Thank you for your patience while we sorted out a bit of our workload, but your reward is that this week we are doing one of my favourite episodes.
It has taken a lot of research and a lot of reading that made me really quite f*cking angry about the way we do things.
Today we are talking about what is actually good for the environment, Plastic glass or aluminium and one of them is the absolute worst and it’s not what you think. And the answer to what we can do may also not be what you think.
I also used a tool called Life Cycle Analysis to put this episode together and you’ll find links to it further down in the show notes.
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Sources:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348005008_Life_Cycle_Assessment_of_Beverage_Packaging
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-020-01804-x
https://www.aluminum.org/Recycling
https://international-aluminium.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/wa_factsheet_final.pdf
https://environment.govt.nz/what-government-is-doing/areas-of-work/waste/container-return-scheme/
Transcript:Kia ora kaitiaki and welcome to Now That's What I Call Green, the podcast that uses a science-based approach to expose the bullshit green scans and help you understand the sustainability world that little bit better. So if you are looking to navigate through everything green or not so green, you have come to the right place. Welcome back. I had a couple of weeks off this pod as I wanted to focus on the business one. Not through any real plan, just I got overwhelmed with all of the stuff.
So we're back and this is one of my favourite episodes. It's taken a lot of research and a lot of reading that made me really quite fucking angry about the way that we, or corporations, do things. But it has been very interesting because today we are talking about what is actually better for the environment, plastic, glass, or aluminium. One of those is the absolute worst, and I promise you, it's not the one you think.
Just quickly, to put this whole podcast together, I used a tool called a Life Cycle Analysis, or LCA. You'll hear me refer to it a few times. These are reports that look at the entire, well, life cycle of a product, all the way from sourcing the materials to the end of life. They are the best thing we have to assess the real impact of a product or material. And I also think this pod might engender a little bit of controversy and lots of comments along the lines of "oh, but what about the plastic in the ocean?" which is obviously a massive problem, but it is the one that people exclusively worry about. Because we see it. We see it in sad pictures of turtles, we see it in seabirds, we see it in rivers clogged with rubbish. And that is of course devastating, but it does mean that we don't look further upstream at all the energy and the resources required to make these materials. And that means we make bad decisions.
Because some of these alternatives lead to just as much destruction, if not more. It is actually really hard to quantify the cost of things beyond just money of plastic ending up in the environment and of course our bodies because we don't actually yet know the harm that it's doing, which is scary as fuck, but that's another story. But it does mean that these LCAs do struggle to incorporate that a little bit. So this pod focuses on the whole shebang so you can make way better, much more informed decisions about what kind of drink you want to buy. Because again, I don't think it's going to be the one that you think it is. And when we know more, we do better. We use 2 billion drinks containers every single year in Aotearoa. That is bananas for a country of 5 million people. Today, about 70% of those containers are made out of PET or polyethylene terephthalate. I'm gonna rip the band-aid straight off. All of the LCA's I read, and I read all of them that I could find, said that plastic bottles have a much lower impact on the planet than glass.
Surprised? Yeah, I bet some of you are. Specifically out of the two, ARPET or recycled polyethylene terephthalate is the best option, followed by plastic, followed by glass bottles, followed by recycled glass, and then virgin glass. I'll get to aluminium in a minute. So let's start with glass. Glass is the absolute worst option because it takes so much energy to make and recycle and it's heavy so it costs a lot to ship it around the world. It has the highest by a country mile acidification potential, which basically means it's potential to cause things like acid rain, which yes is still a concern, but it effectively just means it's putting things like sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and dioxides into the air. These are bad to be clear.
Worse still, and interestingly enough, glass has the biggest global warming potential. So that's the rate that it contributes to climate change. It has the greatest impact on eutrophication, which is where you essentially over enrich water sources, which leads to algal blooms, which leads to dead zones and really unbalanced waterways, which is something we see a lot here in Aotearoa because of all of our farming and freshwater runoff. It is also considered the most toxic to human health, aquatic health and terrestrial health. And now when I say that glass has the highest impact in those categories, I mean the highest by an enormous margin. I was absolutely gobsmacked when I read these. Glass manufacturing has huge impact. It is definitely not a single use product and yet we use it as such and think it is the better option.
Slightly better was recycled glass right? So how much glass is actually recycled? Well, about 21% globally. It is better for drinks containers at 32% and about 42% of all the glass that is collected in Aotearoa is recycled into bottles. This really only happens in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. Everywhere else it's downcycled in things like roads and paving stones. So yeah, glass ain't good. However, because it's always a however, because this shit's complicated, if we ignored everything else that leads up into its creation, the energy, everything else, it is the best option for the planet for disposal. Even though it takes thousands of years to degrade, it doesn't matter because it's not something that animals consume, it doesn't break down into microplastics, and therefore disposal alone, yes, it's the best option.
But if that's the only thing you're thinking about, you're thinking about it the wrong way and we need to move past that kind of thinking. One of the LCA's I have mentioned below in the show notes uses something called a marine litter indicator, which takes into consideration the possibility of the packaging ending up in our oceans. So what is that possibility? Annually, we produce about 350 million tonnes of plastic waste, which is devastating. 350 million tons. In 2019, globally we recycled about 9% of all of that. We incinerated about 20%. We mismanaged about 25% and we landfilled the rest. And if you want to know what mismanage means, it basically means litter.
About 0.5% of that plastic waste ends up in the ocean. And yeah, that sounds tiny in comparison, but that's about 2.5 million tons of plastic ending up in the ocean every single year. And it's estimated that's way lower than it is in reality because it's a very hard thing to measure. So chances are pretty good that the plastic that we use will end up in the landfill or our environment somewhere where of course it doesn't break down, it breaks up into microplastics which are now found everywhere on earth. But if we look at the entire life cycle, plastic is better than glass in every other measure. Even if you use a glass bottle eight times, which is statistically unlikely, it still uses more resource per use than using a plastic bottle once. So that's simple and not at all simple, right? Because glass sucks throughout its entire life cycle.
Though yes, recycled is a little better and recycling rates are okay-ish, but plastic is vastly superior in every measure except disposal. Personally, I think there's a relatively easy solution here. It's to make the plastic manufacturers and the brands pay a very small tax, it could be less than one cent per unit, to build more recycling infrastructure. I remember having a discussion with former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern about this and asking why they didn't have this. And I actually, I cannot remember what her answer was, but I remember being really disappointed because it was wishy-washy and non-committal about why it wouldn't work or why it wasn't feasible. Granted, not a policy analyst, but why wouldn't that work?
Anyway, it is worth adding on to the discussion at this point that we cannot recycle our way out of this crisis anyway. And this is a really interesting talking point for three major reasons. Firstly, the quantities we are talking about are breathtaking. If you just look at the plastic waste, that's not all the plastic we manufacture, that's just the plastic waste. That's 350 million tonnes a year. We don't have the infrastructure for that. We will never have the infrastructure for that amount of plastic. Not to mention the plastic industry is gearing up to produce another 30% by 2030. Plastic production is not going down. Two, it actually doesn't commercially stack up to recycle plastic.
It's not worth it financially. That is why no one is ever going to invest in building the infrastructure we need. And three is the big one. Most plastic is not actually recyclable, it's downcyclable because every time it goes through the recycling process it loses some of those properties that make it really useful. So we can't necessarily make a plastic bottle back into another plastic bottle and that is why so many of the plastic bottles you see are say 50% recycled and 50% virgin plastic. Oil companies knew this decades ago and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on PR campaigns to convince us that recycling was the answer.
So yeah, it's just another evil thing that those absolute pieces of shit have done. Is there a conclusion to be drawn from this? Yes. If you are going to buy a bottle of drink because you need one, go for plastic. Which I cannot believe I am saying. Then reuse it and reuse it and reuse it and reuse it. Or if you are hell-bent on buying glass, reuse it, reuse it, reuse it, reuse it. You're seeing a theme. Someone is bound to point out the health concerns associated with plastic and yeah I mean they're hard to quantify, but they are a viable concern.
But this is again ignoring the health concerns associated with processes that produce glass. It's just further up the line and you just don't think about it. So both of those options, not fab, right? So let's talk about aluminium, the infinitely recyclable miracle metal. The stats are a lot better, but it's a wee bit complicated. 75% of all aluminium ever made is still in use today, which is fucking brilliant. That is a fantastic success. So let's just talk about drinks cans in particular. Globally, we use 180 billion every single year and if we make those cans out of recycled aluminium, that uses about 95% less energy than if we were mining the virgin ore.
But your can is usually made up of about 70% recycled material, it's not 100%. The International Aluminium Group says that globally about 50% of all cans are recycled, which is actually a decrease in recent years and is really dependent on the infrastructure around you because obviously if you don't have the recycling plant, well, you're part of the other 50%. Without question, aluminium is a superior material even when it's recycled. If you were worried about the plastic lining on the inside of all those cans, that just gets burnt off in the recycling process. But it's not perfect.
Aluminium containers score worse than plastic, still way better than glass, when we look at things like marine ecotoxicity, freshwater ecotoxicity, and that's due to the mining and the processing associated with more virgin aluminium. It is also a smidge worse in human toxicity, but overall a better choice. There are stats for days, honestly, this video could be four hours long and you'd probably just be more confused. So I've picked the stats that are, I think, the most relevant from the most robust studies and I've included all of that in the notes below that you can go and have a read if you want to.
So I'm hoping this is as clear as mud, right? Okay, if it was me and I needed a drink, I'd go for a can first, then a plastic bottle and I say this as someone who is clearly not a fan of plastic. I dedicated my entire life to providing people other options than buying things in plastic bottles but it's just not the worst option when you bear the whole thing in mind. But most importantly, I am trying to point out that none of these are good. And I have heard people refer to them as the good choice. None of them are the good choices, the better choice and the worst choice, but none of them are good because they are all inherently single use. And that is the problem. Even if something is made out of wood or cardboard or paper, it's still single use and a massive waste of resource.
At the end of the day, reuse is a huge behavioural trend for many and this debate right here is why I decided to create Incredibles. I did think briefly about retiring when I quit Ethique. I thought about spending my life watching dying coral reefs, buying a sailboat and spending time in my favourite place in the world which is the ocean. But it took less than an hour to realise that that's not really what I want to do and that I would pursue this idea of package-free drinks because we need to change this and I believe that I can help. Because I do believe that a teak helps change the beauty industry and whilst the industry needs a shitload more change, the conversations are happening around the world in almost every brand and that's amazing. We need massive change in the way that we consume, not just knee-jerk reactions like switching from plastic to glass because ultimately if we all did that, we would be in a world of pain.
And finally, for those of you who are listening, that I just say, well, just drink water. We have to inject an element of realism here. I'm an idealist. I think we probably ascertain this, but I also understand people and people don't want to change. They don't want to give stuff up. I don't want to give up everything I love either. So we want a variety of drinks. We want healthy options. We want fun options. We want sparkly champagne. So everybody just drinking water is just not going to happen.
Not to mention millions of people have greater access to Coca-Cola than they do for safe drinking water, which is a travesty I won't get into today. So telling people to just stop drinking other stuff and drink water is like telling everyone to stop traveling or to stop eating meat. Yes, definitely the ideal solution, but not one that is going to actually happen because people are people. So we have to work within the bounds of reality and make these realities less impactful and more equitable. So the takeaway is this, when we consider the entire life cycle, all bottles, cans, jars, they all suck at least a little bit.
Some a lot more than others. And unfortunately, the one people seem to think is the best, glass, is the worst across all measures unless you solely care about disposal. And we all know better than that now, right? So the best option is to do away with the container entirely and grab an Incredible. Because yes, this has secretly been an ad for Incredibles the whole time.
Okay, not really. But you can see the sense in them now, right? Reduce, reuse, and then recycle. Reduce is the key. Reuse is more important. And recycling, well, I mean, it's an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. For further information, I have put all of my sources in the notes below. Because this is quite interesting and it's kind of depressing.
But I hope it's been helpful. Thank you for joining me. Next time we're going to be talking about whether it is possible to travel fairly and sustainably. It's going to be interesting. See you then. And there you go. I hope you learned something and realised that being green isn't about everything in your pantry matching with those silly glass jars or living in a commune. If that's your jam, fabulous. But sustainability at its part is just using what you need.
If you enjoyed this episode please don't keep it to yourself and feel free to drop me a rating and hit the subscribe button. Kia ora and I'll see you next week.
