Plastic Pollution Everywhere

Standardizing design of glass bottles to minimize use of plastics.

While plastics are a great convenience, plastic pollution has become a major concern for the world. Throw away plastic bags and bottles are clogging drains, polluting rivers and oceans.

Items like plastic furniture and containers do not create much problem because they have long-term use and are easy to recycle. It is things like shopping bags and numerous bottles for water and cold drinks that are a major source of pollution. Attempts are underway around the world to ban their use and return to old-fashioned paper and cloth shopping bags as well as glass bottles.

An outright ban on manufacture, sale and distribution of plastic bags with heavy penalties for manufacturers and lesser ones for other users will rapidly bring an end to plastic bags. Humans are innovative enough to come up with easy alternatives as indeed they have already done in many places around the world.

The second item is bottles for water and cold drinks. With increasing pollution around the world the need for using bottled water has increased from health concerns, especially when one seeks water in restaurants, traveling as well as other errands outside homes. Those who cannot afford such water manage without but anyone who can afford this water goes for it since a possible infection from polluted water would be far more expensive. Here is a proposal that shall hasten return to glass bottles for these items.

1. A regulation is required that cold drinks and drinking water be sold only in glass bottles with standard designs and sizes to make cleaning and reuse easier. A paper label pasted in a central indent of the bottle can distinguish products. Label may be a wrap around one with an edge of the paper pasted on paper rather than glass so as to make removal and cleaning easier.
2. The same design in standard sizes of say ¼, ½ and 1 litre perhaps also 2 liters may be prescribed for both cold drinks and drinking water so that interchangeable reuse is possible.
3. Glass bottles are costlier but they may be returned and a refund collected to compensate for this.

The standardized bottles may be produced in a way so that they are amenable to multiple capping, a punch top or a screw top with metal caps or both. A further paper or foil seal may be added on top to make adulteration more difficult if desired.

While use of drinking water and cold water bottles is easily inter changeable, it is not so with milk bottles. Milk has fat content and bottles for it is require a wider mouth for cleaning. Those would need a separate design, standardized across all milk companies and diaries in a country. The bottles can be returned for a refund at the same diary from which the milk is procured or elsewhere.

Once this measure is successful, it may be extended to other products in future such as edible oils and alcoholic drinks. Infact the same design as for cold drinks and water can be imposed on alcoholic drinks too.

It may be mentioned that since glass breaks easily it requires more care in handling. However, humans have that experience from long usage of glass. Further, it is a healthy and hygienic product and there are no easy alternatives to it. Broken or chipped glass bottles may also be recycled to produce new ones.

Bottles made of durable plastic such as those children carry to schools must continue in use since they are put to long term use, not single use. They have the advantage that they are not breakable and therefore a must for school children. Personally if glass bottle drinking water became the norm, I would carry those plastic bottles while traveling and transfer any available glass bottle water to it to eliminate chances of breakages in any chance rough and tumble of travel.

How to
There is a need for governments to set up a committee to work towards this proposal. This committee may seek inputs from manufactures and designers before finalizing designs and proposals. An easy route would be to choose one design from existing designs, seek inputs from others and make that the standard design. Responsible governments would do this immediately, those careless shall not.