I’m in San Francisco at the moment and just loving it. These people recycle, compost like fiends, and their weather is way better than Philly. While drinking a cup of “Ether” at Philz coffee shop, I started thinking again about bottle cap waste. Even in a wonderful la-la-land city away from home on vacation, I find myself thinking of stuff with lots of bummer potential. Plastics polluting our waterways and oceans with no end in sight is not something I take lightly.
About a week ago, I went around collecting different bottle caps. What else can be done with these? Why aren’t these universally recyclable? Why are they all different sizes and thicknesses? For companies to maximize profit on sugar water (or just water), wouldn’t they want to use the least amount of material? Further, it can be easily marketed as being “green” in these “sustainable” times.
Of all the beverage manufacturers, who’s marketing this “green” activity? The bottled water people, of course. If you haven’t seen The Story of Bottled Water by Annie Leonard, I highly recommend checking it out. She highlights how the bottled water businesses are dying out fast…really fast. What’s the difference between your home tap water and your bottled water being collected from the highest snow-covered mountains in the most obscure and pristine places? Nothing. Bottled water is a fancy way of saying that you’re being sold your own tap water for a 2,000% markup.
ANYWAY. I decided to line up a series of caps from shortest to tallest and weigh them. Why? I’m not really sure. Why not? But here’s the results:
Crystal Geyser: 1 g
Generic “Water” brand water (seriously): 1.8 g
Pepsi: 2 g
Coke: 2.1 g
Evian: 2.2 g
Nestea: 2.2 g
Wawa: 2.4 g
Mountain Dew: 2.7 g
I omitted several bottled water caps that were identical to the smallest, lightest one. I’m not surprised at all that bottled water had the thinnest caps. Maybe I’m thinking a little bit too hard about this, but nonetheless I find it extremely interesting and I like to over-think everything anyway.
Why would Pepsi and Mountain Dew have some of the heaviest caps although they’re probably the highest grossing beverage company? Notice their weights are significantly different as well. I also find it funny that Coke is one tenth of a gram heavier than Pepsi. Oh, the competition. Maybe they don’t even know about this. Hey Pepsi, give me the million dollar prize for my “bright idea” of lightening up the weight of your caps by 1g, saving you millions of dollars a year (jokes).
It looks like Aveda is trying to do something about it. They set up a program for recycling the caps to be used for packaging their own product line. Not only are they taking bottle caps, but even stuff like mayonnaise and peanut butter lids…go Aveda. They realize that the number one plastic contaminant washing up on beaches the world over is bottle caps. It’s a shame that they aren’t recyclable by most municipalities, although they are primarily polypropylene, AKA #5 (a common plastic).
How do I wrap this one up? I’m not really too sure what the best course of action is to take. And I really don’t want to tell you what to do, either. I love aluminum cans…maybe buy more of those and less bottles? They’re fully (and efficiently) recyclable…and consequently you’re consuming less plastic bottles with their leaching phthalates. What about bottled water? Drink that tap instead. Yum yum! More traces of chlorine, arsenic and pharmaceuticals, please. Is it avoidable, though? Nope. It’s hard to end this post anything but negatively.
2.5 million plastic bottles are thrown away every hour in the U.S…that’s just short of 40 miles of bottle caps, or 936 miles per day. Sound like a problem? I think so.
Would having a standardized one-piece beverage container make any sense? Time to get designing.