The next plastic outlaw

Glass does look to be a big part of the answer to reducing our reliance on plastic bottles.

Here’s a solid bet. Plastic bottles will follow the plastic bag and become socially, morally and environmentally unacceptable.

This cannot happen soon enough. Globally, one million plastic bottles are bought every minute. That’s 1.44 billion a day.

Of all these bottles, just 9 per cent are recycled. Even if a bottle is recycled that doesn’t make it a guilt-free vessel. With China’s ban on importing plastic for recycling, a huge proportion of ‘‘recycled’’ bottles are now being stockpiled around the world and there is no clear plan of what is to be done with them.

It is obvious we need to move away from single-use plastic bottles and find some alternative, if for no other reason than we will soon run out of places to put them all.

This will require us to change how we package our food and drink and also change our physical and social infrastructure to deal with it. There are past examples to look to for ideas.

Up until the early 1990s milk was delivered to your letterboxes in glass bottles. Once we had drunk the milk we cleaned the bottles, put them back at the gate, and swapped them for filled ones again. The milk bottles were used over and over and over again.

Invercargill’s Farm Fresh South is getting back into this game. It offers home delivery of its raw milk, but residents need to be either at home or leave a chilly bin out.

Unfortunately, that is a level of effort and inconvenience most would be unwilling or unable to incorporate into their lives these days – even if we really, really want to be the type of person who gets milk at the gate.

But glass does look to be a big part of the answer to reducing our reliance on plastic bottles. Though heavier and not as robust as plastic, it’s far more sustainable as a material because it can be used in a closed-loop cycle. A bottle filled with wine can be recycled once empty to become another bottle to fill with wine.

It is foreseeable our food industry giants will eventually respond to the almost inevitable public pressure and recalibrate or retool their machinery to use a packaging material that is not plastic.

If that move is to glass it will require more plants that recycle it into jars and bottles. It will also require local government infrastructure to facilitate the efficient collection of glass for recycling.

This will cost millions, but doesn’t need some breakthrough in technology to achieve.

Smart uses of existing technology are also likely to play a part in reducing plastic use. American company Clear Water Manufacturing last month launched a machine, called Boomerang Water, that can filter, fill and cap more than 300 bottles of water an hour.

The refrigerator-sized machine is selfsustaining, using mains water supply to fill its recyclable aluminium or glass bottles. These can not only be purchased at the machine, but returned to the same machine to be filled again and again.

It may not be the golden bullet, but it’s one thing travelling in a better direction than the one we’re going in now.