Why the Glass Bottle FAILED

globally in 2021 cocacola alone churned out 125 billion plastic bottles about 4,000 each second but not that long ago cocacola and most drink companies at the time sold their beverages in glass containers these bottles would get used washed and then reused over and over and over again in an endless cycle but the glass bottles of the past are dead and you probably already know who killed it [Music] so it may be very obvious to you but we are not living in the Golden Age of glass bottles anymore but remember milk men literally existed glass bottles of milk were delivered to your door on a regular basis with the empty containers being picked up and returned with each delivery of course there is still some places in the world today where you can get bottled milk or juice but it is very rare and we are going to be talking about those examples later in the video because it's very inspiring and cool but first we need to talk about the Glory Days of glass bottles now in the early days the Golden Age of glass those transparent vessels weren't just containers they were a symbol of craftsmanship handmade with Care by local glass blowers each glass bottle was a piece of art albeit an expensive one in the United States in the late 18th century bottles beer and soda were handmade and filled and were therefore very expensive you would only drink these fancy beverages in bars or restaurants or maybe from time to time you would borrow them and then return them to the shop that you got them from on a trust basis sort of like beer glasses in bars today but obviously a lot more fancy and cool and if you're the kind of person who steals beer glasses from bars as a momento I understand where you're coming from don't do it but I understand understand the Temptation because I may have a feww root beer mugs somewhere in storage by the end of the 1800s came industrialization which led to bottles increasingly be mass produced by machines which slowly replaced bottle blowers and with that industrialization leap came mass-produced beverages okay so by the 1920s more than a, Coca-Cola bottlers were operating in the United States six bottle cartons were a huge hit and by the end of the decade bottle sales of Coca-Cola exceeded Fountain sales but even mass-produced these glass bottles were still extremely pricey to make so it wouldn't have made sense to let people just throw them away most bottles had an engraving on them that urged customers to return the bottles once they were empty these bottles were so expensive in fact that manufacturers made a loss if they were not returned often times though because humans are shitty and bad at doing what we should probably do uh they ended up broken in dumps or just being hucked in the bushes by 1910 20 glass containers were being produced for every person in the United States basically they had a glass trash problem similar but on a much smaller scale to the plasic issue that we have today so Coca-Cola came up with a solution not to save the planet of course but to save them money by paying people in 1948 a mere 2cent deposit almost half of the drink's price in Ed that 96% of those iconic fluted bottles found their way back home thanks to that classic money motivator now what's amazing is that this sparked an entire industry that we can't even imagine today the whole economy of regional returnable stations were established where these bottles from a designated area would be collected processed and then refilled a drink hilor would pick up a load of empty bottles from the same place that they would have dropped them off just a couple of weeks weeks earlier this circle of resources was really efficient and ensured that the bottles lasted as long as they possibly could because everyone from the Drinker to the supplier was invested in those bottles making it back around again now I said that this was an industry that we almost can't imagine because in Germany and some other European nations they have figured out a pretty incredible way to keep the system alive with a return rate of above 98% which is apparently kind of impossible to beat I personally went to the Netherlands back when I had way too much hair and they had these bottle return machines at every single grocery store pretty much that you could put your bottles into and it would sort them and then give you a refund on the spot you can return all kinds of Brands including big companies like Heineken this system is probably the closest that we have today to what the peak of glass bottles were like back in the day and we're going to talk about them a little bit later and the thing is this idea makes sense a glass bottle can be refilled up to 50 times without losing quality and back in the day Coke bottles had their own bottling Network across the country all the way back to the early 1900s but as we all know plastic is the default today and Coca-Cola happens to like it that way Coca-Cola as a company though is not a stranger to controversy even late last year there were recalls in Croatia due to several cases of mild poisoning in the process of researching for this video we found this story on ground news it's a platform that we r on for international and local news through both their app and their website the cool and great thing about ground news is that they provide more context than mainstream media ensuring that we get a well balanced perspective for example we can see this story has over 20 sources covering it mostly from right leaning Publications so if you read from left leaning sources you might have missed this one if we look deeper into this particular story though we can see that Euro News tagged as leaning left St States Croatia recalls Coca-Cola drinks following cases of poisoning while 9 News tagged as right highlights Coca-Cola temporarily pulls products after several fall in Croatia the comparison feature emphasizes the importance of context as one highlights poisoning while the other one frames it as several falling ill honestly this is the reason why we gravitate towards ground news time and time again because we genuinely believe in what they are all about this is exactly our motto here at future prooof we want to help people make informed decisions and practice critical thinking every step along the way plus they're based in Canada just like us we got to love supporting fellow Canadians so check them out at ground. news/ Future proof you can subscribe for as little as a dollar a month or get 30% off unlimited access through the link in our description glass was already old news by the end of World War II plastic was the miracle substance that had helped win the war and now the technology was being employed in every possible way back home so I know that we have been saying that coca colola has basically killed the glass bottle and that is still definitely partially true but the reality is that plastic killed the glass bottle and the Takeover was Swift and hostile the war effort fueled a staggering 300% increase in plastic production in the United States during this tumultuous period plastic quickly became a symbol of modern convenience forever altering the landscape of how we interacted with everyday items there is a really cool video here on YouTube by Curtis bowy that shows just how much plastic has worked its way into literally every facet of Our Lives it is quite nearly impossible to avoid it as he shows in this video but it didn't happen like that overnight and it was largely propelled by big corporations with a vested interest in this new technology by the 1970s plastic had already started to replace the once Noble glass bottle after the invention of pet and for a second just put yourself into the shoes of the producers and the consumers at the time it makes sense the material made the whole experience of drinks on the go better it was lighter which made Transportation a breeze it was tougher and more malleable meaning that bottles didn't break during Transportation or when you were chilling at the beach the industrial revolution had made consumer goods available to everyone but plastic made it convenient in 1978 Coca-Cola introduced the 2 L pet plastic bottle and then started producing those little plastic Coke bottles that are sort of synonymous today and Coke pushed this transition hard their advertisement sang the Praises of plastic emphasizing its virtues say hello to Consumer convenience plastic bottles weren't just vessels they embodied practicality picture a picnic unburdened by heavy glass the bottles are resealable and easily disposed of just Chuck them in the forest when you're done H go [Music] go plastic Champions lightweight portability easy disposal it reshaped consumer habits and became a lifestyle choice and already for a long time at this point Coke had made their decision glass costs more to produce more money to reuse the bottles and the biggest benefit that they saw from switching to plastic was that they were no longer responsible for what happened to their containers when they were no longer filled with their product see for the first little while the trash associated with this shift wasn't that big of a deal garbage was sort of just the naturally assumed byproduct of an evolved Society so we kind of just threw our trash in the ocean for a while New York City was like straight up built on garbage this is sort of like how we Associated Smoke Stacks in Old factories cities with civilization in progress before we realized that it was slowly killing us and plastic trash soon followed the same path eventually people started to wake up to the reality that their communities and their neighborhoods were covered in trash and that trash had conveniently been labeled with the names of the companies who had created it this wasn't like the issue of carbon emissions today where it's like oh who's polluting the atmosphere with this invisible gas the murderer was found in the library with a rope and the game was over that was a that was a clue reference there for for anyone who plays clue maybe I'm just the only clue guy here so why is the plastic issue still a thing how did we watch Coca-Cola invent this ginormous problem and then just let them get away with it because I'm not sure if you know but like the plastic issue the pollution of the plastic and the oceans and stuff it's gotten way worse not better since those times and here's the wild thing Coca-Cola has ackowledge their role in this plastic problem admitting to producing 3 million tons of plastic waste annually which seems impossibly low to me but my opinion aside the veil was lifted revealing a stark truth behind the plastic Sheen of convenience they admitted it and yet nobody cared and this for me is probably the most obvious proof that we are living in a dystopian nightmare world run by corporations Coca-Cola admits that they created the plastic problem and then somehow they Gaslight us into cleaning it up for them see in 1953 Koch joined forces with the other beverage and packaging buddies at the time including Philip Morris to birth one of the most iconic anti-litter campaigns of all time keep America beautiful this organization with a touch of cinematic sadness reminiscent of the crying Indian ad declared that keeping America beautiful is your job if you failed at this Noble task you weren't just a litterbug you were a pig wallowing in your own garbage this is like when your date is late to the dinner and then is on their phone the whole damn time and then when you bring it up they're like I don't know what you're talking about also I forgot my credit card do you mind getting this one environmental activists pushed back really hard against all the trash and pressured Coca-Cola into offering a 5cent dep it in 1971 arguing that producers should shoulder their share of the responsibility for a feared landfill crisis that was impending that same year Oregon implemented the first bottle Bill requiring a deposit of 5 cents these bottle bills were massively opposed by the beverage industry obviously and were met with a ton of resistance from Grocers but of course it's not like Coca-Cola was like oh hey that's your problem now and then walked away they did something even more annoying they spent arguably as much money and effort into looking like they were solving the problem as it would have taken for them to actually solve the problem cocacola helped create the national soft drink Association to Lobby against any and all recycling pressures that they might face in 1991 they apparently made bottles made from 25% recycled plastic but then they vanished in 2005 they pledged to make bottles from 10% recycled plastic but they only achieved 4% and then they promised a 25% recycled plastic bottle in 2015 but they only got to 7% and their most recent promise was in 2018 they launched the world without waste campaign aiming for a 100% recyclable packaging by 2025 and 50% recyclable materials by 2030 what I love about this ad is right at the very beginning they show the progression of the bottles from glass to plastic almost like an extra you like like we already had the ability to fix this problem but instead here's a big promise that you don't flee understand and a bunch of fine print that we're not going to show to you but of course the painfully large elephant in the room here that I thought mostly everyone on Earth already kind of knew about is that plastic never gets recycled in June of 2021 the Sierra Club filed a lawsuit at Coca-Cola accusing them of false advertising regarding the recyclability of their plastic bottles climate Town made the whole fraking episode about how plastic recycling is broken have we not all watched that video already so at this point you're you're getting the idea that Coca-Cola is not below any kind of greenwashing I mean they sponsored cop 27 last year what else do you need to know but what all this kind of leaves me asking and probably you as well is why don't they just stop all the stupid Antics go back to glass bottles which we know have a proven track record but the reality is that for glass bottles to make a comeback in a really meaningful way some pretty big systemic shifts are going to have to happen on a smaller scale though things are surprisingly positive a lot of restaurants still sell drinks and glass bottles that they take back to their provider the context of a restaurant kind of makes sense though because it allows for more control where the bottles end up when they're done and many people say that they prefer the taste of drinks that are bottled in glass over plastic and of course the Grassroots all always have the right idea today there is lots of companies and small businesses that still use this bottle return system here in our part of the world Avalon Dairy still uses glass bottles with a return deposit for their glass and they do all their returns inhouse apparently they successfully recycle over 80% of their bottles and they have been in business in British Columbia since the early 1900s I'm sure if you do some looking around in your area you'll be able to find something similar because this is the scale at which this system typically makes the most kind of sense the smaller the area the easier it is for them to make sure that their bottles make it back to their facility for reuse but small Regional Distributors is just one part of this puzzle when I was in Mexico last year I saw a lot of Coca-Cola beverages in glass bottles and it got me wondering why of all places are there glass bottles in Mexico well we did our research for this video and it turns out that people love Mexican Coke mostly because of their use of cane sugar instead of corn syrup but also because they put their beverages in glass bottles Mexico has a ton of bottling plants still partly to do with the lower wages in the country I'm sure but also because of basically consumer demand and I have to say when I was there I had some coke and it was uh it was great we also have to recognize that there are some issues with glass too the production of Virgin glass requires sand which is hard to acquire and wild glass is 100% recyclable a lot of recycling facilities won't EX accept glass currently because it is a contaminant and could be dangerous for workers while glass won't leech microplastics into our environment it still takes millions of years to decompose plus its weight means increased carbon emissions in transport however I'm of the opinion that since we already have all this glass produced we might as well be reusing it and probably the biggest challenge with glass bottles is that they aren't disposable disposability is just built into our culture and our society as Joe Biden says it's good for the economy guess what grows the economy we are very afraid to adopt something that compromises our daily convenience and if we can figure out how to do same day shipping with Amazon packages I'm sure we could figure out some sort of efficient way to bring glass back and forth to the places we need it but here's my final little uh optimistic take on how we might be able to get glass back into the the mainstream do you guys remember mason jars basically we standardize the containers and bottles for all the Staples of Our Lives we pick them up at the grocery stores and we can bring them back to those same stores or we can have them picked up from our homes and redistributed now and while it is a little different there is actually already an idea that exists like this Loop a company corralling the likes of Proctor and Gamble Unilever Nestle PepsiCo is pushing these big brands into the reusable packaging Arena they use a lot of different kinds of containers and they do all the pickups and drop offs similar to like a meal kit service but it seems to be legit so far it's hard to imagine this many big corporations coming on board with something that isn't inherently sketchy but let us know what you think of that down below and if you did enjoy this video make sure that you subscribe to see more videos every single week [Music] he

Channel: Future Proof

Views: 610,184

Keywords: glass, glass recycle, glass recycling, recycle, recycling, glass bottle, plastic bottle, plastic water bottle, disposable bottle, disposable plastic, coca cola, cola cola glass, sustainability, recycle scam, recycling is a scam, eco friendly, eco, bottle deposit, coca cola water, coca cola bottle, glass industry, explainer, explained, environmentalism, environment, climate change, consumerism, future proof

Id: -n15VAcpuAI

Length: 19min 4sec (1144 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 31 2024