Somewhere in the 70’s I remember seeing a commercial for juice in a plastic bottle. It showed a child of 8 or 10 getting a bottle of bright purple juice out of the refrigerator. The bottle slipped from his hand and as it fell in slow motion to the spotless kitchen floor, the voice over told a relieved audience there’s no danger of injury or staining, because it’s plastic! Probably the bottle then bounced off the floor, I don’t remember, but I know my initial reaction was the same as most. Well now, isn’t that a good idea.
Before long there was shelf after shelf of plastic bottles of ketchup, soda, even mayonnaise lining the store shelves. I was environmentally aware enough to catch on that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. The switch to plastic wasn’t a safety issue. How many times have you seen anyone drop a glass bottle of mayonnaise or ketchup in your home? I never have. Certainly the “danger” didn’t warrant the increased contamination of our planet caused by the increased production of plastic. The real motivation was that it’s cheaper to ship light weight plastic than heavy glass jars.
Plastic became too easy to obtain and too easy to discard resulting in a shocking increase in waste. Globally, plastic water bottles sales alone are estimated to generate 2.7 million tons of plastic a year. The annual creation of plastic for water bottles in the U.S. requires 1.5 million barrels of crude oil!
Water bottled in plastic, like all plastic food packaging, is a three pronged evil. The contaminants used and released into the water and air during production, the contaminants in the bottles themselves that then leach into the water we drink, and the disposal of the bottles that creates waste and contamination of air, water and soil. It also uses huge amounts of resources, such as the crude oil mentioned, for a product that’s unnecessary.
It didn’t take long for those of us who were alarmed at the increasing degradation of the environment to point out the dangers of the production of unnecessary plastic. The development of incinerators in the U.S. was alerting us to the dioxins and other disposal hazards of plastics. What I didn’t anticipate were the significant health concerns that would evolve from drinking from the bottles.
My next blog will address Prong One - Plastic Bottle Production
2 comments:
Interesting issue. It does seem like there is one environmental advantage to plastic-- since it weighs a lot less, less fuel is used during shipping. But hopefully shipping companies will move to using sustainable energy soon, so that won't matter so much...
You're absolutely right Kirsten. To me all these different pros and cons is what makes environmental issues so fascinating - and complicated. It's like the paper vs plastic bag debate. What's the trade off for the trees used for paper - chemicals in the plastic. Which is worse? Of particular concern in my mind is the biodegradable issue of plastic vs paper (or glass containers)... plastic never truly biodegrades, and we can plant more trees, although they'll take years to be good carbon absorbers...Hopefully more shipping companies will move toward sustainable energy. I'll be publishing a column on carbon use soon which addresses some of these issues too.
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