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Pepsi Moving To Bottles Made of Plant Material
Master Moose writes "Pepsi unveiled a new bottle yesterday made entirely of plant material. The bottle is made from switch grass, pine bark, corn husks and other materials. Ultimately, Pepsi plans to also use orange peels, oat hulls, potato scraps and other leftovers from its food business. 'This is the beginning of the end of petroleum-based plastics,' said Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defence Council and director of its waste management project. 'When you have a company of this size making a commitment to a plant-based plastic, the market is going to respond.'"
A quite renewable resource; recycles well; doesn't make your drink smell like a chemical factory over time.
I hope after these biodegradable plastic-like-plant-chemicals (that'll probably leech into your soft drink when/if the bottle gets warm), they consider glass as a material for soft drink bottle containers.
How do we dispose of them? Are they as recyclable as petroleum-based plastics?
Also, are they biodegradable?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
The source of the original material is just one part of the equation. Just as important to anybody who cares about the environment is how efficiently the product can be recycled, and whether or not it biodegrades at a reasonable rate. The article mentions neither, and so I'll ask here. Is Pepsi's new bottle as good or better than existing plastics in this area, or are we improving in one area for either marketing and financial reasons, at the detriment of others that are equally important?
I guess it's still the 1950's in Mexico, since they're still washing out and reusing glass bottles.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
No, this is still a major improvement. Less oil usage is good. Less food waste in landfills is good. Less dependency on foreign oil is good, at least for the US's economy. Hell, just because of that, you get minor reductions in income, and thus political power, to a variety of less-than-wholesome Middle-East countries. Major? No. A step forward? Hells yes.
Besides, in case you hadn't noticed, plastic is recyclable. I've got an empty bottle of Mt. Dew sitting beside me - it's going into the recycle bin literally as soon as I finish typing this. No landfill usage at all.
Biodegradable since when? They're just weaning themselves off petroleum; the end product is exactly the same.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
How do we dispose of them? Are they as recyclable as petroleum-based plastics? Also, are they biodegradable?
According to the article: "Pepsi says it is the world's first bottle of a common type of plastic called PET made entirely of plant materials." PET, Polyethylene terephthalate, made from petroleum or from food waste is still the same molecule. It should perform the same regardless of what it is made from.
The base resource the new bottles are made from is waste they previously paid to throw away, now it's useful and customers pay to take it away. That's a win. It also reduces the effects of higher oil prices, as they don't use it (as much) anymore.
Why? It's not like there's a lack of food worldwide, there's just a vast amount of corruption in the supply chain preventing it from reaching some places where it's needed.
Sounds like the bottle is more suitable for human consumption than its contents.
Glass works for beer...it's best when you use local breweries and bottling facilities, then you don't need to transport that far. Companies like Corona have laser printed labels on their glass, and they buy the return of their bottles. They wash and reuse. It's probably creates less polution than manufacturing from scratch each and every time (even if the final product is biodegradable).
I laud their efforts. I suspect glass is still a good choice as well.
No, this is still a major improvement. Less oil usage is good. Less food waste in landfills is good. Less dependency on foreign oil is good, at least for the US's economy.
Are you sure about that? How much more energy is it going to take to make these? If it's more, then where is that energy coming from? Are the raw materials heavier to transport than the current ones? What waste by-products are produced in doing this? What can be done with those by-products?
I don't know the answers to any of these questions. Before you make statements like you did, you may want to look into these, and many other questions first. The end result may be that they use even more petroleum products than the current containers. Or create toxic leftovers in the process.
Are you old enough to remember the styrofoam clam-shells McDonalds sandwiches were served in? Those were just "evil" according to environmentalists. Except they kept you food warmer and could be recycled into all kinds of things. But they were replaced by wax coated paper that could not be recycled. The environmentalists were happier with the paper that could go nowhere other than a landfill and the food is not only crappy, but gets cold even sooner.
Less oil use is good, but using organic sources means encouraging the cultivation of those plants instead of others. Plowing under a diverse ecosystem to plant many acres of nothing but switchgrass or trash paper pine is still a negative consequence. Using corn husks is good, but we already have reductions in corn being used for food so that more can be used as an Ethanol source, and the world needs food as well as less oil dependency. The full array of consequences is always going to be mixed at best. Ultimately, processes like this will have the best impact if they can use a wide variety of organic sources and so a manufacturer can offer to buy up something such as wild Kudzu to reduce or eliminate it from areas where it should never have spread, rather than make people deliberately cultivate the same Kudzu because a major industrial process is now dependent on it. Hopefully Pepsi can use this to target some plants that have been exported way outside of their normal ecosystems, and actually restore some diversity for native plants, rather than promoting more monocultures.
Who is John Cabal?
[citation needed]
Styrofoam (which actually is AFAIK not technically what these were, and I don't mean brand-name-wise, but it's what people call that kind of foam) seems to be one of the HARDER things to recycle.. and food contaminated products (except for bottles & cans) seems to not be recyclable either.
While it's not foam, even pizza boxes for example can't be recycled because they're food contaminated.
(I've largely stopped buying TV dinners since I can't recycle the plastic trays.)
Are you old enough to remember the styrofoam clam-shells McDonalds sandwiches were served in? Those were just "evil" according to environmentalists. Except they kept you food warmer and could be recycled into all kinds of things.
Polystyrene foams are very expensive to recycle and at least at the time of the McDonald's phase out were manufactured using CFCs, contributing to Ozone depletion.
Reading you're post, I'd say that you're not old enough to remember when styrofoam was in widespread use (or that you're a fucking idiot, or both.)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Five hundred years from now, archeologists are going to dig through the remnants of our civilization and try to figure out why we started planting millions of acres of switch grass and pine trees instead of proper food.
In the Netherlands the brewers are all but required to have deposit on their bottles. I would guess 90% of the beer is in deposit bottles.
However there is an environmental downside to reusing bottles: you have to clean them. This is not a simple cleaning process, as there are assholes who store things like paint thinner in bottles and redeposit them afterwards. Cigarette buds are quite common. You have to get everything out that someone could put into it (except for paint and other opaque stuff: the optical detection can see that) because there is no sure way to detect all those toxins (a gasschromatograph would be to expensive and a "electronic nose" isn't good enough yet) so you have to use a heavy cleaning agent to be sure your beer still tastes the same.
Those cleaning agents are very bad for the environment. A degradable bottle that you could compost would be better. (recycling and cleaning is still better for the environment as normal throwaway bottles)
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Incorrect.
You still have to account for people who litter or simply refuse to recycle. Glass will be around for decades. Corn based plastic decomposes very quickly compared to the other options (anywhere from weeks to 3 mosts I believe)
Corn plastic is cleaner to produce than normal plastic and supposedly does not give off all the gas that normal plastic gives off onto foods.
Old people need to learn things have moed on form the 50's and for good reason.
No, he's right. Your comment had one single point: condescension. American brands like Miller, Coors and Budweiser aren't any better than Corona. If you're going to look down on something, the least you could do is find a high place. All you've got is bigoted nationalism. Fuck you.