Why not glass?

The packaging for beverages with the lowest carbon footprint is aluminum cans, but many beverages (especially juice) just aren’t available in aluminum. So, why not glass? When I was a kid, nearly every beverage you could buy at the store came in glass bottles or steel cans. Today, glass is my go-to packaging of choice, if aluminum isn’t an option. Why glass, you ask?

For one, like metal, glass is nearly infinitely recyclable. Plastic isn’t, and although I can faithfully take my #1 and #2 plastic to the recycling station, I know that it will not likely be recycled into new bottles, but rather into “secondary” plastic products such as toys or carpeting. And forget about other plastics, such as #6 (polystyrene) as I have written about earlier.

The main reason for my resolution to avoid single-use plastic is because of the environmental effects of waste plastic in the environment. But reducing my overall carbon footprint is also a worthy goal.

My local recycling station accepts cardboard, paper, steel, aluminum, glass, and #1 and #2 plastic (mixed).

When I went to the recycling station this weekend, I expressed my pleasure (relief?) that they were still accepting glass. They collect colorless, brown, and green (“includes gray, blue and purple”) glass separately. The weekend attendant said that they sent it somewhere in Oklahoma. I found this interesting, because a friend alerted me to the fact that the waste collector Republic Services in central Oklahoma stopped collecting glass as of January 1, along with plastics coded #3-7. The company line was that the “carbon footprint to collect, transport and recycle glass now exceeds the benefit of recycling it. It is no longer environmentally responsible to recycle glass.”

Nice try. It’s more likely that the current infrastructure doesn’t make it profitable for them, and rather than look for alternatives, they’re simply getting out of the business altogether. Case in point: Colorado’s largest glass recycler, MillerCoors’ Rocky Mountain Bottle Company, recently dropped the price they were paying for single-stream, mixed color glass from $60 to $20 per ton. However, this is mainly because a new company is providing them high-quality, color-specific crushed glass called cullet. In other words, a new market emerged with a better product. (Footnote: a local cooperative was formed last month in central Oklahoma so that residents can continue to recycle their used glass.)

And OKC is not alone: last month, Baltimore County, Maryland, revealed that the glass they have collected for the last 7 years has not actually been recycled.

The glass recycling infrastructure in the US isn’t in good shape. Of the 10 million tons of glass Americans discard each year, only about one-third gets recycled. This compares to a 90% glass recycling rate in much of western Europe. The best recipes for new glass actually include recycled glass as a key ingredient. And for each 10% of glass that comes from recycled cullet, CO₂ emissions are reduced by 5%.

One of the Ripple glass recycling bins in the Kansas City metro area.

The multistream recycling model, in which consumers separate their own recyclables, helps. The cullet produced from a single color of glass brings a higher price and helps create better products. This is why MillerCoors switched to using it, purchasing 80% of the supply of the local supplier that opened in 2016. About 10 years ago, Boulevard Brewing in Kansas City helped launch a local cullet supplier, and placed 60 glass collection boxes around the metro area. KC locals have gotten on board, regularly supplying the cullet plant, Ripple, with clean, high-quality recyclable glass. Ripple sends most of its product to the local Owens-Corning fiberglass plant, but a significant amount is recycled into new bottles for Boulevard. The US needs more of this.

Another thing that people often wonder is if glass is truly a better option than plastic. Doesn’t glass cost more to transport? Well, yes it does. However, if we do it right, glass never has to end up in a landfill. And I was surprised to discover that, except for perishable and frozen produce, the cost of transportation of our food products is actually a very small percentage of the total impact on greenhouse gas emissions.

The red part of the bars indicates the fraction of greenhouse gas emissions attributable to transportation of the food product. From https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/02/Environmental-impact-of-food-by-life-cycle-stage.png

Recent comprehensive scientific studies in the US and the EU show that if “You want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food? Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local.” This is because most of the greenhouse gas emissions from food production are attributed to the actual production of the food, and the loss of the land for what might otherwise be carbon-negative uses (such as trees in a forest that store up carbon). On average, as long as you avoid food that is air-freighted, such as berries, greenhouse emissions due to transportation amount to only 6% of the total impact from farm to table. Suppose the impact on transporting food products in heavier, fragile glass rather than plastic doubles the emissions from the transportation. Still, on average, this would make the transportation add up to less than one eighth of the total carbon footprint. An example from the source above states that “Shipping one kilogram of avocados from Mexico to the United Kingdom would generate 0.21 kg CO₂ eq in transport emissions. This is only around 8% of avocados’ total footprint.”

A few weeks ago, I was able to find a tiny jar of mayonnaise in glass. But when I went back, it was plastic, plastic everywhere. I can get mustard in glass (pardon me, but do you have any?). For ketchup and mayo, my only options seem to be organic versions at the natural foods store. So, that’s what I’m doing. But we could make a much bigger impact if we would go back one R to the reuse stage of the refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle… series.

In the 1920s, Coca-Cola introduced a two-cent deposit on reusable, refillable glass bottles, roughly 40 percent of the full 5-cent cost of a Coke and a smile. About 98 percent of the bottles were returned, to be reused 40 or 50 times. I remember when the public works building in my small town was the RC Cola bottling plant. It was (and still is) less expensive to transport the cola syrup long distances, and then transporting the filled bottles only the shorter distance from local bottling plants such as this one to stores. We could try to move back to this kind of model. I feel powerless to make a difference in this area, but I’m trying.

A story I read in National Geographic last week used the Coca-Cola model mentioned above to introduce a story about Loop, a company started less than a year ago that ships you products that you already use in your household–such as Cascde dishwasher detergent and Häagen-Dazs® ice cream–in reusable, returnable containers. They are marketing this as a zero-waste solution, and are partnering with not only manufacturers, but also retailers such as Walgreens and Kroger. Their website states that their service is currently available in the Mid-Atlantic United States and Paris, and will expand later this year across the United States and internationally, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and Japan. How interesting! I’m concerned about the relative impact of shipping individual items to residences rather than shipping in bulk to the grocery store. But this is innovative. If we’re going to make a real reduction in plastic use, we need some innovation.

Three minor victories

In my last post, I wrote about my attempts to avoid disposable cups, particularly styrofoam, and disposable plastic water bottles. I mentioned that we could take a 5-gallon cooler of water for the high school swim team, but it might seem weird. But, inspired by a friend’s comment on the post, I decided to do just that. I found the pump pictured below on the website of a major online retailer with 2-day shipping. I knew there would be a tradeoff, with the waste associated with packaging and shipping the pump offsetting the reduced plastic-water-bottle waste, but I hoped the pump would make a positive impact. I had to sell my kids on the idea, and we compromised — some bottled water for the bus ride, and this pump + purified water for the meet.

The swim team loved the water pump so much that they asked for it to be brought back to the next meet.

Success! My family already uses refillable 5-gallon water bottles at home for drinking water, so I took a full one of those and this pump. It was a hit. I thought maybe it was just the novelty, but athletes drink lots of water, and are used to carrying their own water bottles to practice. A simple reminder to bring them to the meet was all that was needed.

We weren’t on the schedule to bring snacks for the next meet a week later, but I was at work and my wife texted me to ask where the pump was. Apparently, some of the swimmers had asked if we could bring back the water/pump. They liked it. We were happy to oblige! And, since it was half empty, it was a lot less heavy and easier to haul into the pool area.

The second victory was fun. On my way home after working a long Friday evening officiating a swim meet (not high school), I decided to treat myself to a hot fudge shake from the local dairy and burger joint. I keep a straw in my car to reuse when needed, but I knew that this dairy serves their small shakes in styrofoam cups. However, I also knew that they used to serve them in paper cups, and that they still stocked the paper cups for other things, like soda. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t go for using my own reusable cup — it wouldn’t fit onto the shake mixer machine anyway. So it was time to try out the strategy I had devised.

“I’d like a small hot fudge shake. But I can’t have plastic, so could I have it in a paper cup please?” Aha! I thought, they can’t deny someone who can’t have plastic, which is more or less true, thanks to my commitment.

“So, you want a medium, then?”

“Well, can I just have it in one of those blue cups instead of the styrofoam?”

“A medium?”

Maybe a couple of pictures I found online will help explain.

The small comes in styrofoam (with 24g protein! It’s virtually health food!) The medium comes in a teal-colored cup, but that’s sort of blue. The small cup I wanted was the royal blue one. So what did I say?

“A medium will be fine, thanks.”

One thing I didn’t think of — it came with a plastic lid (not pictured). Next time, I’ll just say “no lid.” And I’ll try harder to get the small shake in the blue cup. I could stand to minimize the caloric intake. 🙂

Finally, I’ve been wondering how I can purchase some juice in something other than plastic. Orange juice is a possibility, because you can still get FCOJ at many places. For those of you who don’t recall the movie Trading Places (Sell!, Sell!), FCOJ stands for frozen concentrated orange juice. And I’ve started doing that. But my family is big on cranberry juice. And while American Airlines has no trouble getting cranberry juice (“Is cran-apple OK?”) in aluminum cans, at the local stores, it’s pretty much all plastic.

Plastic, plastic everywhere. But wait — organic cranberry juice comes in glass!

But next to the regular cranberry juice, the cranberry juice cocktail, the cran-peach and white cranberry and cran-grape and cran-cherry and cran-everything — is “all-natural” or “Just Cranberry” or “100% unsweetened cranberry.” You know, the organic cranberry juice. It comes in glass bottles with steel caps. I decided to try some.

My mom tells me that I used to eat whole, raw cranberries out of the bag when I was a kid. While poking them with needle and thread and stringing them with popcorn to make garland for the Christmas tree, I guess I ate more than I strung. So I’m okay with bitter, I guess.

But WOW that 100% unsweetened cranberry “nectar” is potent. I could drink it straight if I had to, but it’s kinda pricey for that, and definitely not sweet. I found that if I dilute it 1:1 or even 1:2 with water, and then add a spoonful of sugar (sing it!), it is pretty much like the pre-mixed name-brand kind. I haven’t done the cost analysis, and the organic juice is significantly more expensive, but with the dilution factor, I think drinking it this way might come out to about the same price per glass. And the color is so beautifully intense! It’s good for mixed drinks as well (add a little to your margarita for a colorful punch!)

As a chemist, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention at this point that the color of cranberry juice is actually due to a color-changing acid-base indicator, and lends itself to some cool DIY science experiments.

Before I wrap up, I’ve learned from some of you that glass recycling isn’t universally available, and that makes me sad. So for you, juice bottled in glass might not be that much better for sustainability than juice bottled in plastic. That is an important issue, but one that I’ll need to save for a future post.

Velcro, kleenex, band-aids–styrofoam?

After I wrote last week’s post, I discovered that styrofoam.com is a real website. It redirects to a DuPont product page describing their extruded polystyrene (XPS) “foam board” product used for insulation. It’s a great product. I installed some when I finished my basement many years ago. It’s similar to the craft foam that you can but at hobby stores. Kind of “crunchy” when you squeeze it or push sticks into it.

But this isn’t what comes to mind for most of us when we think of styrofoam. Most of us are thinking of the expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam products used for food and drink containers. You know the ones: every cup at Sonic or Chick-Fil-A, or the clam-shell takeout containers at your favorite Chinese restaurant.

The name Styrofoam^TM is derived from its building block styrene, which in turn, was named after styrax, the resin from the American sweetgum tree, Liquidambar styraciflua, which also contains cinnamaldehyde. Indeed, some styrene can also be found in cinnamon, so you have likely ingested (and enjoyed) consuming it along with your apple pie or snickerdoodle.

I’ve been concerned for some time about how much waste I’ve added to the stream when I’ve had one of my beloved Coke Zeros. I know it doesn’t break down readily. I’ve been to the lake and have seen floating wooden docks built on styrofoam platforms, and while they get dirty, they never seem to degrade. And I know I’ve been thinking about this for a while, because when I looked in my pantry just now, I found four 32-ounce styrofoam cups that I have attempted to reuse and refill, rather than simply buying another one each time. Reduce, reuse, recycle — right?

But aren’t styrofoam cups mostly air? Perhaps, but one 32-ounce styrofoam cup contains as much plastic as a typical “red Solo® cup” — about 8 grams (see photo). The Solo cup is also polystyrene, just without the air blown into it. So both styles of cup contain about the same amount of plastic.

Masses (in grams) of cups I had in my cupboard — three 32-ounce beverage cups from area establishments, and one 16-ounce Solo® cup

Polystyrene of any type can be marked with recycle code 6. But there is no market for recycling polystyrene, and never really has been. My local recycling station doesn’t accept it, and yours probably doesn’t either. And even if it does accept it, it’s likely that the polystyrene still ends up in the landfill.

Now, I try to always use my Yeti® cup that looks like it would hold 32 ounces, but actually holds 24. (I use less ice though, so still get enough Coke Zero.) But this is easier to do at some establishments than at others. Of those represented in the photo above, I have no problem using my own cup at Schlotzsky’s® or Casey’s. Casey’s even gives me a discount. But it’s a no-go at Chick-Fil-A. I tried to reuse that styrofoam Chick-Fil-A cup there once, and the person behind the counter said they couldn’t do that. I barked that I didn’t want a new cup, and she relented — but I don’t think she was supposed to, and look in her eyes said that I might be scaring her a little bit. I decided it would be best if I didn’t try that again, so now I just don’t get a drink when I eat there. (The sandwich comes in a foil-and-paper wrapper, and the fries are in cardboard, so I’ll still be allowed to have those during my 2020 experiment.)

Read the fine print: $20 Chick-Fil-A tumblers — that cannot be used at Chick-Fil-A

It’s ironic, too. During the holiday shopping season, my local CFA was selling reusable, branded CFA cups. But you can’t actually use these cups at Chick-Fil-A. I asked. It’s for hygiene reasons. Mind you, they have no problem refilling the foam cups that you bought on your current visit (“May I refresh your drink?”), so if there were an individual likely to cause issues with cup hygiene at CFA, presumably it only takes effect once the cup leaves the premises.

And it’s hit-or-miss whether a business you might frequent will support your efforts to reduce waste of single-use plastic. Tropical Smoothie has been in town for a year or two. My daughters like to get smoothies there, and one of them even went at 4am to the grand opening of the location closest to our home and stood in line to get free smoothies for a year. At my age, I don’t need that kind of sugar in my diet, but I stopped by a few months back to try one. I brought my Yeti and asked if they could use it. The teenager behind the counter seemed hesitant (“I don’t know if we can do that”) and, having earlier learned my lesson at Chick-Fil-A, I didn’t press the issue. I just took the smoothie in the styrofoam cup.

But my daughter noticed in a social media post before Christmas from a new location in the town next door that they were offering refillable smoothie mugs. When I made my own post about this, a friend replied that the other town next door (in the other direction) offered these all the time. I got in the car and went there that day.

Sure enough, they did, and they even had two styles of “Whirley Mugs,” so I could get one for each of my two kids could and they could tell them apart. And, in case you can’t read the sign in the image, they cost $5 each and you get a 5% discount every time you use it. The young lady who sold them to me even offered that if my girls used them in the drive-through, to let them know that they had a “Whirley Mug.” That way, she said, they could just pour the smoothie directly into the mug rather than having to pour it over from the cup they had already put it into. She gets it.

I’m not sure why this has to be such a struggle.

Today a friend asked me if I thought what I and some others are doing–refusing plastic, reusing, etc.–would really make any difference. Wouldn’t there need to be regulations to discourage plastic use, for example? As our group talked about this over dinner, another said that perhaps if we keep trying, and this evolves into a bit of a movement, while there are at the same time businesses and manufacturers that also are trying to mitigate the problem from the other side, it becomes easier to meet in the middle.

As I researched this post, I found a story that said that Chick-Fil-A ships “[b]ags of used cups… to a special recycling facility… [to] become the legs to benches… [or] writing pens and name badges for employees. ” This is not what I mean. (Click the link to the story to see a photo of a huge pile of styrofoam cups.) Instead, they could simply refuse to contribute to the production of the styrofoam in the first place. They could, at the very least, accommodate customers who desire to use their own reusable cups. Starbucks doesn’t seem to have a “hygiene problem.” They happily put coffee into my cup, and give me a discount. Or they would, if I wanted to spend $5 on a grande nonfat latte more than a few times a year.

Another story I came across had the headline “Maine becomes the first state to ban Styrofoam.” According to the story, ” The law, which will go into effect January 1, 2021, prohibits restaurants, caterers, coffee shops and grocery stores from using the to-go foam containers because they cannot be recycled in Maine. ” That’s a good start, even if the reasoning isn’t quite what I’d hope. Even if styrofoam could be recycled, plastic is simply not truly recyclable in the way that other materials, such as metals or glass, are. But that’s a story for another day.

And not all states will go the way that Maine is. In 2015, according to a Dallas Morning News story, there were at least a dozen Texas cities with bans on single-use plastic bags. Dallas didn’t ban them but attempted to impose a 5-cent fee per bag. In Dallas and in Laredo, businesses sued, backed by lobbying from the plastics industry and others. They won. In 2018, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that bag bans violate the Texas Solid Waste Disposal Act, and all such bans can no longer be enforced.

As for me, I’m making mental note of where I can eat that will allow me to use my refillable cup, and planning to frequent those places more and other places less. It’s all part of the experiment.

What does “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” even mean in 2020?

A photo of the recycling bins in my garage.

As a kid, my family didn’t participate in recycling. I didn’t know anyone who did. In fact, I don’t think I had even heard the word recycling. But everyone reused stuff. Just give a quick internet image search on the term “jelly jar juice glasses.” People sell these as antiques, now.

Stores didn’t sell 2-liter plastic bottles of soda, or 20-ounce bottles, or any plastic bottles. I remember being able to buy Coca-Cola in 6-packs of 10-ounce or 12-ounce glass bottles, or even in 32-ounce glass bottles. These were returnable to the store for a nickel each, and kids like me would pick up bottles or ask adults for their bottles so that we could return them and get a little bit of money to buy a candy bar or pack of gum.

I didn’t live in the era of the home-delivery milkman, but I do recall when we could buy milk in quart or even gallon-sized glass bottles — even at the local convenience store / gas station — and return the bottles for sanitizing and refilling. Juice came in glass bottles, or metal cans, or as frozen concentrate in cardboard cans. (Remember the insider trading on “FCOJ” in 1983’s Trading Places?)

Empty coffee cans became storage containers, like this one I saw recently in my dad’s garage. When margarine in a tub started to become the norm, families like mine saved the tubs and lids and reused them. I still have some of my surplus Christmas lights (saved to repair old strands for the tree) stored in old margarine tubs. Some people took this to extremes — saving hundreds of baby food jars in the garage to hold nails and screws, or collecting mountains of smelly dog food cans in the barn (a story about my father-in-law that I only heard about) to use for who-knows-what. What packages do you remember your parents or grandparents reusing?

But since recycling wasn’t “a thing,” we still threw lots of things into the garbage that, today, I’d be recycling. Steel cans that had contained soup, Hershey’s syrup, Hi-C “Grape Drink,” or La Choy Chow Mein (blech!). Cardboard cereal boxes. Glass mayonnaise jars, ketchup bottles, or later, Ragu spaghetti sauce jars.

Today, more and more of these items are available mainly, or even exclusively, in plastic. Sometimes this is beneficial for freshness or safety, such my box of Grape Nuts that now has a plastic bag inside. But typically, is is simply for convenience, or to reduce the cost of production and transport. In 2011, Planter’s Dry Roasted Peanuts switched from glass to plastic packaging. They even added a green leaf image to try to imply that their “84% less packaging” was eco-friendly. And they didn’t even add a recycling code to the container. That was the last time I bought any.

I’m here to announce my new-year’s resolution. In 2020, I pledge to use zero — or as close to zero as possible — single-use plastic items or packaging. This means no water or soda in plastic bottles, no disposable plastic or styrofoam cups at fast-food restaurants or convenience stores, no plastic straws (except those I’ve saved and reused). I don’t plan to entirely give up some things, such as margarine, but wherever possible, I will choose a sustainable alternative. And I’ll write a blog post every week in 2020 to chronicle my experiment. Along the way, I will explore some facts and myths about recycling.

I hope mostly to tell a story about my experiment. I do not claim that one person avoiding single-use plastic will change the world. And I do not plan to avoid all disposable packaging. I will choose paper, glass, or metal options when possible — resources that are all (as I will flesh out) more renewable or sustainable than plastic. Mostly, I hope to show what is and is not possible to accomplish as I embark upon this journey, and perhaps inspire someone else to attempt their own journey towards sustainability.

Already, I know that it is only because of privilege that I am even able to begin this experiment. Much like those who attempt to live a vegan lifestyle, it is more easily accomplished when one has the monetary resources to make choices that aren’t the cheapest option. I understand this. I can afford to spend extra on a product that comes in sustainable packaging, and I know that others cannot. While I plan to make sacrifices, it is not my intention to imply that these sacrifices compare to the tremendous sacrifices made by others who serve their country in the military to keep it safe, or who leave their country and become refugees because it is unsafe. Nor do I intend my choices in any way to make me out to be a better person than someone who cannot or does not wish to make similar choices. I simply wish to highlight some of the consequences of our choices as a society, and as individuals, and hopefully point out some places where our choices can make a difference.

Next week, I will explore the recycling of plastic — what is possible, what is practical, and what is actually happening. I’ll share what I know (as an organic chemist) and I’ll do some research so that I can accurately report on some of the things I don’t know. I’ll compare plastic recycling to the recycling of other materials, such as metal and glass. Then, each week, I hope to tell a bit more of my story.

Wish me luck on my journey.