Glass Bottle, Can or Plastic: Which Container for Your Drink?

The narrator starts from an order of magnitude. In Europe, each person throws away about 188 kg of single-use packaging per year. Choosing the least problematic containers is therefore, in his view, a real issue. The comparison begins with glass and aluminum, starting with the manufacturing phase.

To obtain 1 kg of aluminum, it takes on average 7 kg of raw rock. Bauxite is extracted from it, which then has to be crushed, refined and melted in a furnace at 660 °C. The whole process generates up to 13 kg of CO2 equivalent.

For 1 kg of glass, a mixture of silica, cullet and additives such as soda ash, potash and lime is prepared. This mixture melts at 1,400 °C, a temperature twice as high as for aluminum. Yet these steps generate only about 1 kg of CO2 equivalent.

At this point, the glass advocate thinks he has won. The narrator then points out the overlooked parameter: the amount of material.

A can holds 33 cl, a bottle a different volume. To compare equal volumes, the narrator uses a "functional unit": 1 liter of beverage.

• Aluminum: about 41 g to hold that liter.
• Glass: about 650 g for the same volume.

On this basis, over its entire life cycle, the glass bottle has twice the impact of the can on most indicators. So the friends settle on the six-pack of cans.

The third friend then brings up the plastic bottle, which the first considers "not eco-friendly at all." The narrator acknowledges that plastic is problematic on several levels. It is made from petroleum, and turning it into plastic involves refining, cracking, polycondensation and extrusion. But it takes only 36 g of plastic to hold 1 liter. The production impacts of a plastic bottle therefore remain lower than those of glass or aluminum on a good number of indicators.

The flip side of this advantage is the drink itself. Along with the ginger beer, you would also be drinking polyesters and polyolefins, in other words microplastics. According to the video, a plastic bottle could contain up to 100 times more microplastics than tap water.

One of the friends objects that drinking aluminum is no better. The narrator replies that exposure to aluminum from a can is almost negligible. Manufacturers have in fact coated the inside walls with a thin layer of plastic to prevent contact with the drink.

That layer in turn produces microplastics. According to "some studies" cited in the video, a can may contain up to 10 times more of them than a plastic bottle. The same studies reportedly found even more in glass bottles than in cans. The suggested cause: the paint on the bottle caps contains plastic, which would disperse into the drink.

The friends then come back to the plastic bottle, since it is labeled recyclable. The narrator points out that recyclable does not mean recycled, and that the term is often used as a selling point.

In France, only 25% of recyclable plastic packaging is actually recycled. In Germany, the rate rises to 51%, partly thanks to more efficient collection and processing. Then there is the problem of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), used for bottles. It can only be recycled two to three times, because each pass significantly weakens the material.

The narrator details what happens to 100 bottles put on the market in France:

• 39 are "downcycled," meaning recycled into other products, notably lower-quality polyester fibers;
• 30 are incinerated;
• 12 end up in landfill;
• 19 are actually recycled into bottles.

With process losses, those 19 bottles yield 14 new ones. In the end, barely 14% of bottles make it back onto the shelves.

According to the video, recycling aluminum is no simpler. In France, barely 40% of household aluminum packaging is recycled. A can combines two to three different alloys:

• one for the body;
• another for the lid;
• a third for the pull tab.

On top of that come the inner plastic layer, the inks and the decorative varnish. Separating all these elements to make a new can is therefore difficult. There are also losses at collection, when the packaging is not put in the right bin, and at sorting, when the facilities are not efficient enough. Finally, making new cans requires energy.

The friends come back to glass: costly to manufacture, it might win out on recycling. The narrator agrees with this reasoning in life-cycle terms. The recycling rate for household glass packaging reaches 81% in France and 88% in Germany. With the glass bottle, there is therefore a real gain over the life cycle.

He does, however, add one caveat: the paint on the caps, for which manufacturers would be "well advised to find something better."

For the narrator, there is an "almost perfect" option with glass: reuse. The opposite of throwing away is not recycling but reusing. The more a bottle is reused, the more the impacts of its manufacture are spread out. Compared with a single-use glass bottle, a reusable bottle could become the better environmental choice after as few as two to four reuses.

A deposit-return system organizes this reuse. You pay a few cents more at purchase and get refunded when you return the container, which is then cleaned, refilled and put back on sale. The narrator stresses the importance of a local network: the system loses much of its benefit if bottles have to travel hundreds of kilometers by truck.

One of the friends remembers bottle deposits at their grandmother's. The narrator explains that the deposit system was long the norm. In France, it disappeared at the end of the 1960s with the rise of supermarkets and disposable plastic, which was cheaper and lighter but far more polluting overall. Germany has kept a real deposit culture thanks to political measures.

According to the narrator, recycling has its limits whatever the material. Collection and sorting would need to improve to reduce losses. Recycling consumes energy, creates new impacts, and infinite recycling does not exist. Reusing, especially through short local loops, is "clearly better." But it still has to become a habit, which depends on individual choices as well as on collective infrastructure and industry decisions.

The scene ends with the friends ready to return the deposit bottle and start again.