FYI; cans are plastic lined.
Asklemmy
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
TIL. Do you know when that started?
Always. We used steel before then because it wouldn't react with the drink. We always knew aluminum cans would be cheaper, but couldn't figure out how to protect the flavor and carbonation until Coors figured out how to line it with plastic. He shared the process for free with his competition because he knew a recycling program would scale really well.
That's not entirely true. In the early days they used wax to line the cans because steel still leaves a taste in the drink. It just didn't work very well and also caused carbonation issues as the CO2 diffused into the wax.
Wow, multiple TIL on this thread.
It's true, but the amount of plastic in the cans is pretty negligible, especially compared to plastic bottles and the aluminum can is still by far the most recyclable beverage container.
Also there are new linings that don't use plastic but natural materials called oleoresinous linings but they're not good for acidic things so they're not very wildly used.
Do you remember when Sun Chips changed their chip bag material to a more environmentally friendly compostable material? People lost their minds. Why? Because the bag crinkled a lot. All of the boring late night talk shows made fun of Sun Chips bags. So, they switched it back to the old bags.
Moral of the story is that people don't care if something is better for the environment if it inconveniences them now. If everything was in cans people would cry because they can't close them or whatever. In fact, many items that were previously sold in cans are now plastic. Also, money... Cheaper to wrap water in plastic.
You can still buy Coca-cola in glass bottles if you look hard enough. But they are pricey.
I got laughed at on other platforms by older generations for even suggesting the notion of mild inconvenience to make future generations lives easier.
They don't want us or them to have a better life, not even if it costs them nothing - but ESPECIALLY not if they have to do literally anything differently.
The "fuck you I got mine" mindset. Sigh
"fuck you im gonna die before the ramifications for my actions harm anyone"
Do you remember when Sun Chips changed their chip bag material to a more environmentally friendly compostable material? People lost their minds. Why? Because the bag crinkled a lot.
No... Because it crinkled at a high enough volume that you actually have to worry about hearing loss. People weren't losing their mind for no reason.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703960004575427150103293906
It is louder than "the cockpit of my jet," said J. Scot Heathman, an Air Force pilot, in a video probing the issue that he posted on his blog under the headline "Potato Chip Technology That Destroys Your Hearing." Mr. Heathman tested the loudness using a RadioShack sound meter. He squeezed the bag and recorded a 95 decibel level.
The Bag was louder than the ambient noise in a jet fighter cockpit in flight.
So just make aluminium bottles with a cap.
They already do in the US, they sell beer like this. And I'm pretty sure I've seen water packaged like this too.
We don't have Sun Chips here so I'm not aware of this, but I'd be really curious to learn how much of that freakout was genuine and how much was engineered by entities with a vested interest in maintaining status quo.
They were extremely loud. That doesn't mean they should have stopped making them, but people aren't joking about them being loud.
The bags were very noticeably louder and stiffer. Not enough that I would complain but it was something you noticed right away.
You would NOT want to have one in a movie theatre.
At the time, I thought the Sun chips bag situation was hilarious. If I think back on it now, it's really sad. Yes, the bag was significantly louder than the original bag. But I feel like we're going to need to make some sacrifices as a society for the environment. And that seems like a really, really tiny sacrifice.
One important thing to keep in mind that is that you cannot "just" make things from aluminium.
One reason the beverage can gets away with using so little alu for so much content is that that it's pressurized and hence held in shape by its very content. This is why flat drinks have to have the extra air inside it be overpressurized and hence will stil fizz briefly when opened. And the shape of a bottle is not good for being held up by uniform pressure.
We can put non-pressurized things into it when either the content is light (cremes etc) or is in itself rather stable (powders). But even then we use a lot of metal for the container. To truly save, it needs to be something that pressurizes from the inside, which among other things can be inherently unsafe (spray cans come to mind, don't puncture them).
Aren't aluminum cans still plastic bottles on the inside?
A standalone plastic bottle is 20-40g of PET.
The lining of a soda can is about 1g of BPA.
They have plastic coating, yes, but way less plastic and way easier to just burn it off in the crucible.
Money. Plastic is so integrated into the supply chain that divesting from it would require retooling probably thousands of bottling plants, at significant expense, with no guarantee of ROI.
I buy distilled water for my daughter's baby formula bottles. They all come in plastic jugs and I really wish I could just bring a glass jar somewhere to get it refilled. Because I just know all that plastic is leeching into the water.
It's a shame that glass jars are so uncommon around here. The plastic is so wasteful.
My thought is that itβs incredible how enormous the packaged drink market is. Tap water + filter + insulated bottle. Profit.
I understand that not everyone has the luxury of planning ahead but the drink market should be less than half of what it is today. Most people drink bottled drinks because of marketing and subliminal pressures and habits.
There are alternatives to plastic. As stupidly expensive as it is, Liquid Death is water in a can. Iβve also seen water in paper cartons and larger bottles made of glass. Soda is available in cans as well. Teas and juices are available in glass. You may be choosing to drink a particular brand thatβs only available in plastic.
You have plenty of choices. You have the choice to drink a particular product out of plastic. You have the choice to not drink that. You may be faced with having to pay a little more or to drink something thatβs not your favorite. In an ideal world, more people would spend a little more on their purchases to increase demand for the manufacturing of a product which could bring prices down while decreasing demand and manufacturing of popular packaging.
You know cans are just plastic sacs using the tin/aluminum for structure right?
There must be more to it than this. As a Dr. Pepper connoisseur I can tell you that Dr. Pepper from a can tastes far superior than from a bottle.
It's a different type of plastic, AFAIK it's like a spray on polymer for the aluminum cans; But I think the biggest factor is probably UV degradation of the ingredients in the soda with the clear plastic bottles.
It's a different type of plastic because it doesn't need to be structural. Plastic bottles use PET, cans use a variety but I'm commonly seeing BPA.
We have saturated our environment with aluminum to the point where one of our "background ailments" is light metal poisoning from aluminum - most notably as a decline in intelligence. We keep 'choosing' the cheapest easiest solution to liquids packaging and distribution - and each one of them - EXCEPT GLASS - has come back to bite us on the ass.
Do you have any sources for this fairly common naturally occurring ~~biologically important~~, and in human uses bioinert metal causing "light metal poisoning" from either natural background doses or incidental from human pollution?
I don't want acute poisoning, specifically sources on chronic background doses.
Since when is aluminium biologically important? I'm under the impression that humans (and other life?) do not need aluminium at all.
Having said that, my info is that it's nothing to worry about. It is very common in food (naturally and since forever), and the body can get rid of it, and they haven't been able to show adverse effects except in very very high doses. That's the messaging I've been seeing anyway.
This sounds like one of those Facebook facts....
As others have said, source?
We have a water company here that sells water in cans called Liquid Death, I don't know if they are international or not.
We also have beer companies that use aluminum bottles over cans, might just be Bud Light and Coors but I dont drink cheap pilsners.
We don't recycle enough and don't have the capacity for processing if we did recycle enough. There is no real financial incentive for companies to spend more on aluminum bottles vs cans or plastic. Aluminum bottles have a plastic liner because drinking out of raw aluminum tastes bad and might contribute to Alzheimer's(might not be true).
I want us to go back to glass bottles but we stopped using them so much because we are terrible people and leave broken glass everywhere and plastic is better for shareholders. Seriously, we we were using glass the amount of broken glass shards in parks, streets, sidewalks, parking lots was a problem when I was a kid.
If you're talking about the US, then you have to spell it the way we spell it.
Lol true, Aluminum
I refuse to buy mineral water because of this. Only in emergency mode.
I always carry my reusable bottle (Tupperware) wherever I go.
Do you mean in things like plastic water bottles or other beverage containers like plastic bottles containing soda?