this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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Mildly Infuriating
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Easy solution: only buy drinks in aluminum cans or glass bottles. World is already drowning in microplastic pollution.
Surely making aluminum and glass cans isn't good for the environment either is it?
Making brand new ones from raw sand/ore isn't great when you consider the need to mine and refine those into something useable. Lots of energy and effort goes into that part. The difference is that glass and aluminum are essentially infinitely recyclable, while plastic is often not. It takes way less effort and minimal input of new resources to recycle a glass bottle. Hell, with a robust bottle return system you can skip over the recycling part entirely - just send them back to the bottling facility to be cleaned and refilled.
Emphasis on "plastic is often not". Only PET (#1 on the symbol) can truly be recycled into new material, and usually it's tossed in with other materials and contaminated enough to make that not possible. There is the reusable path, where plastics are remolded into other purposes, but that's not "really" recycling and likely ends there for that form to eventually degrade and be trashed.
So just make more things with PET and recycle better, right? I'm guessing there's limitations on what PET can be used for given its characteristics vs. other plastics, and it is still cheaper to just get new material for new PET rather than recycle. So of course companies are going to go that route.
The interesting thing that I learned not so long ago from the YT channel Climate Town is that people see the triangle symbol with the plastic type number inside and assume it's recyclable, since that's the recycle symbol. But it's not that symbol, it's just designed similar to give that impression.
Pet can only be remelted and shaped before it starts breaking down..
Glass is a bugger to recycle as even little admixtures of the wrong stuff can spoil the whole batch. Crush it up and it's very useful as aggregate in concrete, though. In the case of glass it's much better to reuse than recycle.
Glas is also heavy meaning it costs more energy to transport, overall PET bottles actually have a quite good environmental and climate record provided they actually get recycled.
Stainless steel is also infinitely recyclable and should be able to be used without liners. Shouldn't even be heavier than aluminium cans as steel and aluminium are ballpark equally strong by weight (aluminium is stiffer though, not necessarily an advantage). PET is probably going to need less energy of all when recycling, though.
Problem is the stainless steel you'd need to use in order to get the corrosion resistance and non-reactivity with the contents is prohibitively expensive. Cheap stainless steel alloys offer pretty poor corrosion resistance - see the CyberTruck rusting after being rained on a few times.
Hmm. Random price for 1.4571 (probably complete overkill): 20 Euro/kg. Let's say we use a bit more material than current alu cans, 20g per, that's 50 cans per kg or 40ct per can quite a bit more than the 25ct deposit we currently have on cans. OTOH that was a random price for 50cm of round stock of the right diameter to get to 1kg, if you're actually buying it in bulk from the mill it should be quite a bit cheaper (also while you're at it get sheets). Doubly so if you can feed that mill with very pure recycling material they barely have to touch to get up to spec again.
I'd say it's doable.
If you use approximately the same amount of material as in an aluminum can, you're already at 3x the weight of an aluminum can. Stainless is also far less malleable and much more brittle than aluminum, so the minimum wall thickness is much higher for steel. Aluminum can walls are 0.11m thick, whereas the minimum wall thickness for stainless steel alloys is around 0.50mm thick. Meaning you'd need around 4.5 times as much material, making the stainless steel can weigh at least 10 times as much as the average 15 gram aluminum can. A 12-pack of soda would weigh 4.5 pounds more. Now imagine how much transporting that extra weight costs.
Stainless steel is great for reusable stuff, but it'd be impractical at the same scale as aluminum cans.