The preparations in starting up One Blue took a lot of time and during this period a lot of choices needed to be made. Not only the tablets should be satisfying, but also the reusable bottles in which the tablets would dissolve and used should be chosen. And that choice was maybe the hardest of all.
The choice to use reusable plastic bottles and not glass for our ecological cleaning products gave us a lot of headaches. We want, amongst other things, battle against plastic pollutions and at the same time offering what is the cause of that pollution? It sounds contradictory.
But before taking this decision, and it was with reluctance, a lot of research was done, but also talks with a packaging specialist, for example from the University of Poznań. Followed by internal discussions and a lot of thinking. Because rushing into things was not an option in this case.
Next to environmental reasons, which we will discuss in more detail shortly, there are also practical reasons. For example glas is breakable and brings extra weight. We need 500 ml water for 1 tablet, plus the weight of the glass bottle that needs to be carried around and taken to the places where you want to clean.
A cleaning product can be put down rather roughly, a bottle can fall and so easily break if it’s made of glass.
All these considerations obviously point more into the direction of a plastic bottle. It’s lighter to carry around and also less easy to break.
On top of that there is the transport of glass bottles. Again easier to break and losses during the transport. But as they are heavier it also means a higher emission because of that extra weight. Both from the supplier to us as from us to you. Because of the danger of breaking we needed adjusted packaging, which would make costs higher, in packaging and shipping.
But these reservations didn’t come as first.
The above reasons alone are not enough to chose one or the other. If we take the environment into consideration it’s sometimes a must to do a little extra. So we had to dig deeper. And we found that in 2021 still 25 % of all plastic waste is ending up in landfills. That’s extremely a lot. Most of it is being processed and dumped outside of the EU, but that doesn’t make it any better. Pollution elsewhere also has its effect here.
32,5 % gets really recycled. The problem with plastic is that with every recycling it looses quality. Plastic exists of polymers which gets shorter every time. Plastic usually gets “down cycled”. Recycled plastic is also at least 20 % more expensive than new plastic, as are work and energy is needed to produce it.
But also obtaining the raw materials, oil and gas, give waste and pollution. Producing “virgin” plastic happens with not natural polymers, lange lines made out of small connected molecules. Depending on the type of plastic the melting point lies between 70° C and 200° C. As we will see below, a lot less than for glass.
But products starts with obtaining the raw materials. Then comes the cracking, heating and pressing until the fall apart in simple parts like ethylene and propylene. Polymerisation is where these molecules are chemically linked together into long chains, the polymers. And as last these polymers are made into the plastic products we are daily using. The “beads” are pressed into different shapes or sprayed into malls.
By dumping plastic in landfills dangerous chemicals are being released into the ground or groundwater and this for hundreds of years to dissolve. And of course let’s not forget the microplastics that are everywhere now, in our food, in the air, in water and in our own bodies.
Glass on the other hand can be recycled infinite, it never looses its quality. But does it all really get recycled? And what with the production.
One of the biggest suppliers of this silicium is India, where they also found abuse of employees. And the dust in which they need to work, probably with a minimum protection, can lead to
long term longue diseases. Melting the raw materials to produce glass is done in ovens that reach 1500° C or more. During this melting also greenhouse gasses are created. If 10 % of recycled glass is added, which is often happening, a 2 to 3 % decrease of energy consumption occurs. Depending on how and where the glass is produced, with fossil fuels, also this will give huge emissions.
Even though in the EU 70 % of glass is being recycled, all the rest is also dumped in landfills. Glass is not toxic but needs 4000 years to decompose.
Not all glass can be recycled. Coloured glass can only be melted with its own colour, so an extra selection is needed. Windows and Pyrex can’t be recycled, because of their production method to be resisted to high temperatures. Glass must first be processed into shards and divided by colour and other substances to be recycled. This is time consuming and labor intensive. So very often it’s just grounded into fibres to be used into isolation. Glass that is dumbed into landfills is often put above other waste, to reduce the scent of the rotting process.
The big problem with glass is the extraction of raw materials and the emissions during production and later the transport, as we wrote above.
We sometimes also came across “wheat straw” bottles. No much information can be found, but it sounds good. But when we were talking with packaging specialist it’s not all a good news show. Mostly these bottles these bottles do not contain more than 20 % wheat straw, 30 % if you’re lucky. The rest is just plastic and it has to be recycled like that. We have seen bottles made with 70 or 80 % wheat straw and they looked very different than what we saw in the market and were also not really practically usable. Also some bamboo bottles where sometimes just bamboo on the outside, plastic on the inside. We really needed to be careful in what we would offer.
We know, it’s all very technical and boring, but this is, in a nutshell what we have found online and learned from discussions with specialists. So it is not clear-cut and difficult. Both have pro’s and contra’s but the decision was uneasy. In general plastic seem to have a smaller footprint over glass, which was a big surprise to us.
Long discussions, a lot of thinking, many considerations, but eventually it were the specialist, who had nothing to do with the business at all, that convinced us that plastic is the better option in this moment of time. At least for our ecological cleaning products. For other products, already waiting in the pipeline for the future, glass might be the better choice, for practical reasons.
We want to emphasise, reuse the bottle as long as possible. We estimated 9 times should be possible, maybe even longer. Refill tablets are available, as are spare sprays, in cause they would become defect. And if the bottle is at its end, recycle it as it should.
So this is the message that remains, not only for our bottles, but in general, for plastic as well as glass, reuse, upcycle, try to avoid single-use bottles. And if you don’t have a choice, recycle, don’t just throw away. That is what we try to do here at One Blue, with our reusable bottles and refills.
Sources:
https://earth.org/glass-bottles-environmental-impact/
https://www.goingzerowaste.com/blog/which-is-better-for-the-environment-glass-or-plastic/
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230427-glass-or-plastic-which-is-better-for-the-environment
https://ecochain.com/customers/case-study-packaging-plastic-vs-glass/
https://oceanblueproject.org/glass-vs-plastic-bottles-from-waste-to-worth/
https://www.futuretracker.com/post/glass-plastic-or-aluminium-exploring-the-environmental-impact-of-beverage-containers
https://www.endplasticwaste.org/insights/story/environmental-impact-of-five-different-soft-drink-containers
https://repurpose.global/blog/post/which-is-better-for-the-environment-glass-or-plastic