What to think about when you buy a soft-drink

So I went to the corner café this morning and while standing around waiting for service, my eye fell onto their notice board where all their soft drink prices were posted and saw:

500ml soft drink in a plastic bottle: R8

500ml soft drink in a glass bottle: R6 (that includes the deposit of R1 which you get back if you take the bottle back).

I asked Guida who runs the café why she’d arranged things that way. She sorta snapped at me that those were Coca-Cola’s set prices – not hers.

It made me wonder why, in heaven’s name, we even have plastic bottles?

Guida had no idea.

I phoned Coca-Cola (the holding company for the Valpre bottled water brand incidentally) up to ask them if the price difference was some half-hearted attempt on their part at trying to be eco-friendly or if bottling in glass was in fact cheaper for them in the long run. I was met with wtf? and they put me through to a lady who told me she’d find out and get back to me.

We’ll see about that.

But on to more important things. Like our choices in the matter.

While a lot of us like to comfort ourselves with the argument that plastic is recyclable, how many of us actually recycle our used bottles? 

In fact… have you *ever* handed a plastic bottle in for recycling?  

Well have you?

Huh?

Huh?

OK assuming you have. If plastics are actually being recycled, then, considering the mountains of available garbage, where exactly are all the products made from recycled plastic mmm?

Ya just don’t see them, do ya? OK I'm being unfair there are like... four scattered around the internet... ok maybe more but they hardly represent a comparable production share. Comparable to the amount of trash we have, I mean.

As pointed out at Ecology Centre (and we all know somewhere deep down inside of ourselves that this is the case) most collected plastics are not recycled. Not even the ones collected for recycling.

Our hero, Captain Moore backs this up in  this eye-opening talk.

This means that (if it doesn’t blow away or get washed away) your bottle will end up in a landfill where it will sit and leak toxins out into the soil for the next thousand or so years.

 If your bottle doesn’t make its way into the landfills it will end up in the same place as the rest of our orphaned trash. The sea; where it will turn into this.

While if you had chosen a glass bottle, you would have been responsible for this.

And that is the most eloquent argument of them all.  Here are some more good reasons to choose glass.

The important thing is to realise that our responsibility doesn’t end when we throw that bottle away. It becomes part of our personal carbon footprint. If there was no market for Coke in a plastic bottle you wouldn’t find it on the shelves.

UPDATE 15 DECEMBER

Yeah. Still no answer from Coca-Cola. Jus' sayin'.

UPDATE 27 DECEMBER

Nope, still nuttin'