Digging our way out of plastic waste

Can we bring back the reusable bottle?

Plastic pollution. As problems go, it’s one of the biggest and toughest nuts to crack. Initially, plastic was something of a godsend, a cheaper and safer way to package and deliver food and beverages, and its use exploded in the 1960s and 1970s. But like most human enterprises, few people were thinking about the long term impact of this product, particularly when it came to disposal. We just assumed we could toss the used containers in the trash, like all the other garbage we create, and never give it a second thought.

The problem is that plastics take centuries, if not millennia, to decompose. Compared to food and paper waste, plastic is practically immortal, and as it slowly breaks down, harmful chemicals and microplastics pollute our land and sea, resulting in negative consequences for the well-being of animals and humans. Recent studies show that nearly all of us have microplastics in our bodies, with the highest concentrations in our brains.

More alarmingly, there appears to be a correlation between dementia and microplastic concentrations in the brain. An article in the University of New Mexico’s Health Science News said, “Complicating matters, brain tissue from people who had been diagnosed with dementia had up to 10 times as much plastic in their brains as everyone else.”

The good news is that humans created the plastic pollution problem, and humans can solve it. There’s no silver bullet for getting us out of this mess, but as they say at Citizens’ Climate Lobby with regard to climate change solutions, there’s plenty of silver buckshot.

I’ll be examining some of that silver buckshot here in “Problem Solved,” and today I’m looking at a solution that harkens back to a previous era — reusable containers.

Image by Niels Steeman from Pixabay

Remember deposit bottles?

When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s, I supplemented my modest allowance by collecting soft drink bottles, mostly Coca-Cola, and bringing them to the grocery store to redeem the 5¢-per-bottle deposit. Five bottles would earn me enough change to purchase a pack of baseball cards. I realize I’m sounding like my dad, who used to tell us that he could ride the New York City subway for a nickel, but, yes, I’m old.

Living in a family with four children, we drank a lot of milk, which was delivered to our home several times a week in glass bottles. When the milkman deposited the fresh milk in the metal box by our side door, he would retrieve the used bottles and bring them back to the dairy where the bottles would be sanitized and refilled.

The process, in both cases, was a closed-loop system that relied on local infrastructure created by the companies that sold these products. Coca-Cola, for example, set up franchises for hundreds of bottlers across the country that were within a few hours’ drive, if not closer, to most retail outlets. Glass Coke bottles would be reused — not recycled, reused — as many as 50 times before they were crushed up and made into new bottles. Similarly, local dairies used a closed-loop system in which glass bottles could be reused 20 to 40 times.

Interesting side note: During World War II, Coca-Cola built 64 bottling plants in Europe, North Africa and Asia, with Coke President Robert Woodruff decreeing that “every man in uniform gets a bottle of Coca-Cola for five cents, wherever he is and whatever it costs the company.”

The explosion of plastic

Unfortunately, from the plastic pollution perspective, that closed loop system of reusing glass soda and milk bottles went into rapid decline starting in the early 1970s with the invention of PET plastic. As Levi Hildebrand explains in an excellent video, “Why the Glass Bottle FAILED,” plastic had a number of advantages that manufacturers really liked:

• It was lighter and easier to transport than glass, saving shipping costs.

• Plastic was easier to mold into any shape desired.

• Nearly indestructible, plastic bottles were safer and reduced costs from breakage.

As reusable glass bottles faded from the scene in the ensuing decades, single-use plastic bottles became the norm, and the world was quickly awash in plastic waste. Under the previous system, manufacturers like Coke were handling the waste of their packaging by collecting and reusing glass bottles. But with plastic, handling the waste fell to consumers, who disposed of their empty plastic bottles with the rest of their trash. For companies like Coca-Cola, the cost of this waste — disposal, health and environmental impact — became someone else’s problem, even though it was waste that they manufactured.

As more became known about the harm of plastic waste, manufacturers of plastic containers realized they had a huge public relations problem on their hands and started promoting recycling as a way to greenwash their product. The problem, though, is that plastics recycling is a bit of a myth. Although the PET plastic used in beverage containers is the most suitable plastic for recycling, only 29% of those bottles are recycled, according to 2018 figures from the EPA. In addition, those plastic bottles are not used to make new bottles; instead, they are downcycled into other products like fleece jackets and carpeting. New plastic bottles must be created for every beverage manufactured and sold.

So, reusable glass bottles are by far the most environmentally-friendly packaging, but their use is now dwarfed by plastic. Is there any hope of bringing them back? There are encouraging signs.

The Dairy industry

Let’s start with milk. While most milk is sold in plastic jugs, there are still a number of dairies in the U.S. that sell milk in glass bottles that are returned/retrieved to be cleaned and refilled. Dozens of dairies offer milk in glass bottles, many delivering their product to customers’ doors. The website Drink Milk in Glass Bottles provides a directory of dairies offering milk in glass bottles. At the moment, this is a niche market, mainly because milk packaged in plastic is cheaper. Many consumers, however, are calculating the hidden cost of plastic and deciding it’s worth paying more to keep some of our plastic waste out of landfills and oceans. Also, wider use could bring about economies of scale that could bring the price down. Ultimately, of course, the expansion of milk in glass bottles will depend on consumer demand. In addition to having glass-bottled milk delivered to your home, you can ask your local grocer if they could sell it in their stores, with customers redeeming a deposit on bottles they return for the dairy to pick up and reuse.

The return of Coke’s glass bottle?

Many Americans assume Coca-Cola no longer uses glass bottles due to the widely circulated story in 2012 of Coke closing its last bottling plant that manufactured its curved glass bottle filled with 6.5 ounces of its classic beverage. Other plants, however, continue to make different-sized bottles, like the 8 oz. variety. In many countries outside the U.S., glass is still widely used. Mexico, for example, still bottles much of its Coke in glass and exports their product to the U.S., where it is in demand for the use of sugar as a sweetener instead of corn syrup. Many consumers also prefer the taste of Coke in glass bottles.

Encouraged by the appeal of its Mexican product, Coke launched a pilot program in El Paso in which 100 restaurants now participate. The eateries offered Coke in glass bottles, with customers returning the bottles to be picked up by the distributor and taken to be washed and refilled. When the restaurant needs more product, the distributor delivers a crate or two and picks up the empty bottles, which are taken over the border to Mexico where the infrastructure still exists to reuse glass bottles. The folks at The Story of Stuff Project produced a short video about what’s happening in El Paso, “Coke is Secretly Bringing Back their Vintage Bottles…Only in this US City,” that was posted late last year:

As with expansion of glass milk bottles, increased use of glass in the beverage industry will depend on consumer demand to exert pressure on the soft drink sector. A 2022 survey from the Glass Packaging Institute showed high consumer support for glass packaging:

• 92% of respondents said they would feel positively toward a company that offered more glass packaging because of its lower environmental impact than other materials.

• 76% of respondents were familiar with the fact that glass is infinitely recyclable

• 58% said knowing that glass was infinitely recyclable could make them change their purchasing behavior.

• 73% of respondents said they wished more companies offered their food and beverage products in glass packaging.

As You Sow, an organization applying pressure on corporations to increase use of reusable bottles, takes the approach of shareholder initiatives. In 2022, they secured a commitment from Coca-Cola to sell 25% of beverages in refillable containers by 2030.

Unfortunately, two years later, Coke reneged on that promise, saying it “intends to continue to invest in refillable packaging where infrastructure already exists.” As Environment America put it, “It turns out that Coca-Cola’s commitment to refillable and returnable containers wasn’t The Real Thing… Instead, Coca-Cola’s self-proclaimed ‘evolution’ on plastics is actually a regression to an outdated reliance on recycling.”

Closing the ‘Loop’ on packaging

In 2019, the environmentally-minded company TerraCycle launched a revolutionary concept in reusable packaging called Loop. Adele Peters of Fast Company, covering the startup of Loop, explained how it worked:

TerraCycle worked with companies like Procter & Gamble, Nestle, PepsiCo, Unilever, and more than a dozen others for over a year to develop the new platform. Each package in the system is designed for 100 or more uses. In the initial launch, products will be available through Loop’s e-commerce site. When you order, say, deodorant or mouthwash, you’ll pay a deposit for the bottle. The order will show up in a reusable tote–designed by engineers at UPS to withstand repeated journeys–instead of a cardboard box. As you use up products, you’ll throw the empty containers back in the tote. When it’s full, you can go to the Loop website to request a delivery driver to pick it up (or, if you prefer, drop it off at a UPS store).

Eventually, consumers were able to purchase products at stores, pay a deposit and return the containers to redeem the deposit. After several years, however, Loop failed to scale up and was discontinued everywhere except in one country — France — where the idea took hold. French retailer Carrefour now offers the Loop service in 340 stores throughout the nation. Buoyed by success in France, TerraCycle hopes to make inroads in other countries.

A Loop station at a Carrefour store in France. Photo from Loop

Throughout all of Europe, efforts are being made to increase the use of reusables. Late last year, the European Union adopted a regulation requiring retailers to sell drinks in reusable packaging. The new regulation requires stores to sell 10% of drinks in reusables by 2030, increasing to 40% by 2040. The regulation will be applied to the 27 nations that belong to the EU.

Reusable bottles and packaging still have a steep hill to climb in order to gain the kind of market share that will make a significant dent in the plastic pollution problem, but the initiatives currently under way offer hope for the most effective approach to reduce plastic waste, which is to stop putting products in plastic containers in the first place.

Update: This post has been updated to reflect the fact that two years after Coca-Cola’s commitment to reusable containers, the company backed off on that promise. Yeah, wish I’d seen that before this post went out.