this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
49 points (82.7% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35824 readers
1305 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] meekah 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Glass is almost always the most environmentally friendly packaging for drinks. Aluminium needs a lot of energy to be recycled and can only be used once. I'm not sure how it works in the states but here in Germany we reuse our glass bottles up to 50 times.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yeah here in the US no containers get reused as is, due to corporate lobbying from pre 1990. Aluminum also is less energy intensive to transport since containers weigh less! Both are infinitely preferable to plastic containers.

[–] meekah 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Ahhh corporate lobbying is a beautiful thing. Halting progress to make sure the rich get richer! But thanks dor that explanation. Also a good point about Aluminium being lighter.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Aluminum also takes way less energy and is much cheaper to recycle than to produce new! I think roughly around 2/3rds of all aluminum ever produced is still in use because of that. Don't remember the exact figure, just remember it from my material science electives from college. Aluminum beverage containers usually have BPA liners, which is far from ideal, but as a material in general, it's pretty nice

[–] meekah 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

yeah, absolutely! I'm not trying to say that aluminium is a bad material. Just that it's not the right choice as a drink container, at least once you convince the population to return bottles to the store (the deposit system here in germany works pretty well. when people don't want to return the bottles, they put them next to the closest trash can, so homeless people can collect them and return them to the store for a small reward)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

There's a bottle and can deposit system in some states! You pay an extra 5c per beverage and get 5c back by returning the empty container. Only in like 5 states, but it works well. They don't get reused, just recycled, but I think that's pretty much the only way plastic bottles get recycled here, as most recycling is extremely contaminated.

Sorry not disagreeing with you about beverage container material choices! I just like chiming in with more info because I really enjoyed those packaging science classes I took. If I could live my life over again I'd do that instead of software tbh. Glass containers being reused instead of recycled is the dream, imo, but in the current US if you replaced all plastic beverage containers with aluminum ones that would still be a massive win. Transportation energy costs should only improve, so as time goes on that will matter less and less in the equation, but you can also achieve denser packing easier with aluminum packaging than glass. Glass containers don't take non-cylindrical shapes as easily, or rather, cylindrical containers are far easier, more reliable to produce, and in general a lot more durable. If you swapped from plastic bottles to hexagonal aluminum ones, where you can achieve near perfect packing efficiency, that would be amazing. Far more containers per load, a roughly equivalent weight per container, made from a material that's ACTUALLY recyclable, and (this I don't actually know but I believe to be true) more easily automatically sorted out from contaminated recycling, that also has a financial incentive built into it to be recycled? That would be really really really good. Ultimately glass is better, the reusability is REALLY nice and glass also recycles incredibly well, and isn't harmful as a pollutant, and also doesn't require a questionably toxic (I believe BPA is an endocrine disruptor, but this isn't something I know for sure) plastic lining? Oooooo yeah. That's where it is.

Also just a fun fact, blue glass is like incredibly contaminating color wise, it only takes a tiny bit of blue glass to color a load of clear glass it's being added to blue! Not a problem with the material, just cool.

Another fun fact, ever wondered why bottles have the bumps running around the edge on the bottom? It's because the containers warp subtly as they cool, and with a purely circular base, this would give you an ever so slight saddle shape and it wouldn't sit stably. With the bumps, there's always at least 3 points of contact, so it's stable!

[–] meekah 1 points 5 months ago

Ohh thanks for chiming in! A lot of cool info in your comment, especially that last part about the bumps at the bottom of glass bottles.

I can only agree that aluminum is better than plastic, but I'm not sure about hexagonal cans. The cans we know nowadays are insanely well engineered and only use a minute amount of material, taking advantage of the pressure of carbonized drinks. I don't think there's any way to increase packing efficiency of Aluminium cans without increasing material thickness to an unreasonable degree. But regardless, if all drink containers were regulated to be Aluminium (or glass), it would certainly be a big improvement.