This smells like astroturfing in favor of plastic. The fact that something contains "traces" of PFAS is not that much of a revelation. Unfortunately, thanks to tragically insufficient environmental regulation, PFAS have gotten everywhere nowadays, so most naturally sourced ingredients will contain traces of PFAS.
It is important to know how much PFAS they contain, whether those amounts are higher than the wood feedstock (i.e., are PFAS being added), whether the amounts are medically relevant, and whether the amounts are more than the alternative. (And lets not kid ourselves, stainless steel straws are not a viable alternative.)
I'm not so sure this is the case regarding paper straws/cups. At least regarding paper cups, they do not involve paper alone but some addition of plastics (extra hardness and plasticity, avoiding water soaking). I suspect it's the same for straws as the same reasons apply. So this measurement is likely a result of production and not outside pollution.
Maybe they're not a complete replacement in all cases, but for getting an iced latte from the local coffee shop, the metal straws are just fine. There are also reusable plastic ones.
Paper straws are the perfect example of human hypocrisy. It sounds so convincingly good for the nature and makes everyone forget that the oceans are polluted with fishernets.
Effectively, paper straws are really really bad when it comes to recycling. Since paper doesn't have the right qualities for a straw (it will soak up all the liquids pretty fast), they are usually coated inside. That makes it problematic for recycling since you somehow need to reverse that coating. Besides, recycling paper costs a lot of water.
Plastic on the other hand doesn't need coating and is pretty easy to recycle (a bit harder if it's colored). The reason why this doesn't happen is simply that new plastic is much cheaper than recycled one. I'm afraid with the de-icing of Greenland this trend will continue with all the new sources of oil.
This is one of the few issues where I feel I'm the only sane person on the planet: you can just drink from the cup.
We survived the first 600 million years of multicellular life without straws, and we can last a few more.
People are at each other's throats over nothing. We could've been a type 2 civilization by now if we spent as much time researching energy extraction as we do talking about straws. </hyperbole>
I always chuck the paper straw out at restaurants. I find they often have a weird effect of rapidly decarbonating the drink. Agreed that straws are just not useful for 99% of drinks. Only required for thick drinks.
far from the first time people argued to death over what is ultimately a slight convenience.
But for the sake of devil's advocate: putting your lips directly against a piece of plastic or glass is one of the easiest ways to expose oneself to a myriad of germs and bacteria. a wrapped straws solves many problems about cups in public outings that you cant fully control. and it leaves non-disposable cups just a bit cleaner.
It's also a big factor for the elderly or disabled to prevent spills or worse.
PFAS are used to add a water resistant coating to paper products, so I’d imagine straws to be worse than most paper cutlery as they literally needs to be designed to be submerged in water.
Stainless steel is expensive, roughly a factor of 10 compared to plain steel. The reason is that Chromium is expensive. You can use low-chromium not-so-stainless steel if you then coat it with transparent paint containing among other things, PFAS, and save a ton of money on the material.
Edit: the prototypical stainless steel is Cr/Ni 18/10 with 18% chromium and 10% nickel, aka V2A or 1.4301
Straws require ridiculously small amounts of raw materials though, if you choose a material that increases the steel price by $1000/ton, then that adds a single extra cent to the costs of a 10g metal straw which then retails for a dollar a piece.
So you're saying you can cut it out and increase profit by a percentage point? That's pretty huge.
I recall finance going ballistic on my division at one point because our profit margin dropped by a tenth of a percentage point (and yet was still well above fifty)
Certainly. Especially when they load the cheap stuff with all the useless Bluetooth/wireless smart phone app crap. I guess people think a crappy grill with flashy widgets and an app is the next best thing. Or maybe it's what companies think people want.
I mean I have a pretty standard $250 or so Weber. No bells and whistles, no apps. It takes propane and has enough surface for me to do 8 patties comfortably and has a small rack above it for things that just need to be warmed up more or less. I like having things that last but it's going on idk...year 4 now? And I just need to replace grates at this point. I just can't see myself buying a $1000+ grill because I don't grill every day/week and the $250 has done perfectly well for me. I don't think it's safe to assume tons of folks want bluetooth for their grill and that's what drives them to go cheap.
That sounds unlikely. It's not how stainless steel works; to bond a coating to the surface of the stainless you have to fight the stainlessness pretty hard.
One of the best indicators for not so stainless stainless steel is a coarse texture to aid in that bonding. Even some fairly expensive brands of vacuum flask exhibit this. Only way to be sure that I know of is a knife.
Generally, the easiest way is with a magnet. The most corrosion-resistant of the common stainless steels are austenitic. These steels are not ferromagnetic, or very weakly ferromagnetic if they have been cold worked. Cheaper and less corrosion-resistant ferritic stainless steels are strongly ferromagnetic.
Martensitic stainless steels are less corrosion resistant than austenitic steels and are ferromagnetic, but they're used for good reason. Unlike other types, martensitic steels are hardenable through heat treatment, making them the only suitable choice for many sharp-edged tools or parts subject to severe abrasion. Stainless steel cutlery is most commonly an 18/0 ferritic grade, but premium cutlery may be an 18/10 austenitic. Kitchen knives are invariably martensitic, because ferritic or austenitic grades wouldn't hold a sharp edge.
Bamboo also has its issues [0]. I think mainly because it is kept in shape by bad stuff. Could be that your straws are really 100% bamboo, but some products are something like ground bamboo in some polymer.
The ones I have are just drilled out bamboo sticks (they vary in size and have visible bamboo structure), not reconstituted. I've never seen other types of bamboo straws (everything appears to be paper around here, once I had a pasta-straw), so I'm really curious.
i think the bigger issue is probably that the paper straws are about an order of magnitude higher in mass, virtually 100% organic chemicals, and so represent about an order of magnitude higher resource consumption
the bigger issue than that is that disposable straws, even after that order-of-magnitude increase in impact, are an absolutely insignificant issue in ecological terms and yet have somehow become a political issue and spawned new laws and ridiculous greenwashing marketing
To me it doesn’t seem that paper straws is about the resource consumption or oil used or anything like that. I think you have completely misunderstood the purpose.
Even with the order of magnitude increase in resources used it’s still insignificant, as you touch on.
What’s not insignificant is that in the contexts where straws are used.. fast food and coffee shops and such, they’re all too likely to be just thrown out into nature rather than being properly disposed of.
Any material in that category needs to be biodegradable. That’s just a hard requirement in my opinion. So plastics is just not a suitable material.
Yes, there are other sources of plastic pollution that are much worse in volume. Though they tend to end up in other places. We need to work on all the sources of plastic pollution in parallel.
(Unless we go the other route and do massive bioengineering of microorganisms to let them break down plastics)
from my point of view, it depends on how much of it there is and what effect it has on the environment
sand, glass, metal, and rust aren't biodegradable either, but i don't think we should ban mountains because they throw sand out into nature when they erode
plastic straws are generally polypropylene, which is photodegradable to relatively nontoxic materials
Plastic straws strewn in a natural setting feels a lot worse than sand. I can't tell you exactly why, but I still think that "don't throw plastic around" is a good starting place for a discussion and I don't think it's productive to argue that point.
Reading about this, you're right definition-wise (Glass is not biodegradable), but in practice Glass is degradable to safe materials - and this happens naturally - which is what we really want.
polypropylene is indeed pretty inert when it's not photodegrading (though there are some interesting studies finding biodegradation https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:yE8AZEyCArgJ:sc... but all in aerobic environments afaik), but when it does biodegrade or photodegrade, the degradation products are pretty harmless, as with glass and sand
it does photodegrade reasonably fast if exposed to sunlight, in years rather than decades (or millennia as in glass)
implanted soda-lime glass causes irritation in a similar way, by the way; i have a granuloma in my foot right now which is encapsulating a splinter of glass i'm biodegrading. the issue with polypropylene is that it's, believe it or not, more resistant to biodegradation than glass, at least inside the human body
the issue with polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins is not just their persistence; as pointed out above, things like glass, sand, and polypropylene are even more persistent. the issue is that in addition to being persistent, they're toxic—but not acutely so, except in extreme yushchenko-like cases
Even if that’s not the case, “resource usage” is not the right metric to optimize for, this cost-focused mentality is exactly how we ended up with plastic [literally] everywhere.
Hundreds of billions of plastic straws are thrown away every year, this is a massive problem even if its only a few % of the total.
probably it's good to have plastic everywhere if it decreases environmental damage
the hsu analysis is wrong because it's omitting the energy consumed by growing the trees; it rates "craft paper" as 12.6 kJ/g, but according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#In_chemical_rea... burning wood produces 18 MJ/kg = 18 kJ/g, which is to say, more energy than that is still available in the end product, without even taking into account the "embodied" energy dissipated in processing
the energy consumed by the tree in growing is about 20× larger than this, 300–400 kJ per gram of wood, which is close to 700 kJ per gram of paper, because about half the tree is lignin, which is digested in the papermaking process and then discharged into waterways
it does give a reasonably plausible (if misleadingly precise) figure of 95.4 kJ/g for the polypropylene straws
also, it incorrectly compares 200-mg polypropylene straws against 200-mg paper straws. but paper straws are, as everyone knows, enormously thicker than polypropylene straws of the same level of durability; even with the accounting error of omitting the embodied energy of the paper, its conclusion presupposes the opposite of my premise above, which you should have mentioned in your comment (but presumably could not because you had not actually read the study you were citing)
in fact, a typical 6-mm-diameter paper straw made from 330 gsm paper at a length of 200 mm weighs some 1250 mg, roughly 6× as much as the hsu study's 200-mg estimate. a 200-mg paper straw would be 53 gsm; that's like tracing paper. it would collapse immediately if you tried to suck on it
finally, it is not correct that hundreds of billions of plastic straws are thrown away per year, and those that end up in landfills (which is the vast majority) are not a problem at all. nor are they a few % of the total, as you say, but 100× less than that; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_straw#Environmental_i... says, 'In total, they are less than 0.022% of plastic waste emitted to oceans.'
I’m not surprised you replied in less time than it takes to read the first paragraph. The study is about embedded energy, so yes one assumes it does account for energy used growing trees (remember the solar energy they use is free), unless you have evidence to the contrary?
I can’t even start understanding that logic. The whole reason we’re having this discussion is that we know the environment, especially marine life, is being ravaged by plastic waste.
i have added my calculations to the contrary to the comment above, perhaps after you wrote your comment, so you can see that i had somehow come to the correct conclusions before reading the first paragraph
consider the possibility that this is because i have previous knowledge of the area instead of just pasting the first link google throws at me, so my opinions are based on domain knowledge instead of the kind of common sense that tells you the world is flat
if solar energy is free then why do we care about embodied energy
we do not know that the environment, especially marine life, is being 'ravaged' by plastic waste. it is being ravaged by clear-cutting (including for papermaking), by industrial waste effluents (including from papermaking), by agricultural waste effluents, by global warming, by ocean acidification, by habitat destruction from farming (including tree farming), by overfishing, by desertification, and by dumping of toxic waste
there is clearly a problem with plastic waste due to poor waste disposal practices in a few countries (mostly indonesia and the philippines) but in the overall scheme of environmental devastation, it is comparatively small, and plastic straws are an utterly insignificant part of that comparatively small problem
The Wikipedia article you linked to says a marketing firm estimated daily usage of plastic straws in the US at 390M, not much lower than the kid's estimate. The estimate for Europe is 25 billion/year, according to other sources that are also not a 9-year old.
Why are you surprised solar energy is free? We're talking about trees. It's not accounting for the energy consumed in the creation of crude oil either, I'm sure you already know that "embedded energy" refers to extraction + transportation + manufacture, not the mass of the materials.
Straws are especially harmful to animals as it already comes in an easily 'consumable' size, even before it starts degrading. They are nearly always single-use and thrown away at a rate higher than any other plastic product. Research keeps popping up pointing to plastic as a contributor to the death of coral reefs, damage to sea life, and we have no idea about the actual impact of microplastics now found embedded in the tissues of every living being.
I still cannot understand what type of argument you're trying to make. Having plastic everywhere is obviously not good for the environment even if paper ones take more resources. Paper is renewable and biodegradable, oil/plastic is not, and we still have several orders of magnitude more energy available.
I have heard this argument from perfectly healthy people, and I couldn't really believe it, since there are just so many other touch points when you go to a restaurant.
If someone is immuno compromised I think this makes sense to extent.
Some drinks are designed for straw (iced, layered, smoothies) and some people want to have more control during intake (maybe they think packaging is dirty or fear for makeup). Then it becomes a mindless habit
For passengers, maybe, but people really should not be eating and drinking while driving vehicles. Distracted driving kills. Stuffing your face can wait until you pull over or get home.
Local shop near me sells very large drinks with very secure thick lids with two holes (bigger pluggable hole to drink from and super tiny to let the air in). Sadly it's all plastic too of course.
(edited to remove claim that straw is no better than secure lid with a small hole, it could be a little better)
Consumers demand it, and we chose a society that mostly freely provides goods for consumer demands. So is your issue with the free market, or is it toothless consumer elitism
(I don't mean this reply to be a defense of the market either. I'm asking you to evaluate what is core to your criticism)
The presumption that all advertising is merely crass mass manipulation in order to force consumers to do things they otherwise wouldn't want to do is, I fear, continued elitism.
And in the context of this discussion, you might be asked to prove that straws are used purely because of the manipulations of marketers.
There are tons of reasons. New location just opened. New product is available. Improvement to old product was released. Inventory clearance sale is about to happen. Seasonal businesses that are just entering the season. New consumers who might not be familiar with the products available to them.
I work in a business that serves a lot of local advertisers. We do take national and agency client business, but the majority of our work is with local businesses. They do it because it works. People hear the ad and foot and digital traffic to their locations increases.
Advertising is just a market. "Advertisers" are just people with a business who want to reach consumers. I'd be far more comfortable with the case that, as a market, it should be policed by some administrative agency, and like most administrative agencies over the past few decades they're likely asleep at the switch and so the market shows obvious signs of abuse.
This is why I, and the other poster, take some umbrage to what seems to be a very simplistic elitist take from you. This is a market. It has benefits, and it has the potential for abuse. Rather than looking at this as a social problem that simply needs basic agency actions to be solved to defend those benefits, the rather radical idealism of destroying the market entirely gets bandied about a little too comfortably.
I concur with your first statement to the extent that people ab initio demand straws and aren’t mostly just failing to examine why everything already comes with one, but your question presents a false dichotomy.
My problem is with poor education and critical thinking skills, and the anti-intellectualism on display whenever you see full-grown humans stamping with their fingers in their ears because “I just want what I want!”
Well, you could mandate that women aren't allowed to use particular types of beauty products to compete for more desirable partners, and hope that the follow-on effects of that lead to lower straw usage. But then you're totalitarian and convoluted.
It’s not more totalitarian than most of the laws, you’re just not used to this one. Someone from another planet may be stunned by the fact you can’t drive your car at the speed you wish, some sexual practice are prohibited and many chemicals used for decades are now forbidden.
We have a lot of things that we don’t need. Abundance and option (rather than bare sustenance) are defining features and goals of a healthy society.
That’s a long way of saying that there are a lot of things we don’t need, but that eliminating them makes relatively little sense. We should instead develop compensating systems based on those needs (such as disincentivizing single-use straws, and normalizing reusable ones in the ways that reusable bottles and bags have been normalized.)
You’re wrong, it falls under some minority belief. Even the president of France said last year “we’re living the end of abundance” and he’s a liberal productivist. Abundance is clearly at most a target of healthy minority within a non heathy society.
I don't know if this was intentional on your part, but that Macron quote appears to be grossly out of context: he said it in the context of an expected difficult winter due to the war in Ukraine and an ongoing drought in Europe[1]. He ties it more broadly into consumer changes that will need to happen as part of climate change, but he's not talking about an end to the kind of baseline abundance that citizens of modern developed countries expect (around competing products in their stores, etc.).
(And in case it isn't clear: I'm entirely for reducing society's unnecessary forms of consumption, especially when it comes to personal modes of transit, wasteful packaging, and unsustainable residential patterns. But abundance is an independent variable.)
I see that there might be some cases where a straw can be helpful or necessary. But there are handed out so many straws wh ich aren't needed. I never understood why they put a straw into my whiskey cola or cuba libre.
We should get there where we just hand out straws if people ask for them as it is with other extras.
You don’t have to outlaw anything. Disincentivize it.
“But then only the rich will get to rot their teeth out!” Good, I guess? So what?
“Poor people will still spend money on sugar water! You’ll drive them deeper into poverty!” Then the price isn’t high enough yet. It needs to exceed the cost of the dental and medical work it will precipitate. Which by definition will price many poor people out of sugar water. Which it should.
Nice approach, but IMHO outlawing would be easier and healthier for the society:
Easier: track down illegal sugary drinks is easier that track down at what price a drink is illegally sold.
Healthier: forbid those drinks and all the folks forking for that industry will now work for something more useful the the society instead of trying to find ways to convince people to drink their shitty fluid.
You don't have to know at what price the drinks are sold. All that matters as the government is that you know how much is being moved around. Then you charge each link in the chain appropriately. The rest works itself out in the market.
I disagree with the legislative approach, but just think of how much cheap/free labor the war on drugs supplies. A war on sugar would keep those numbers up! Good job boys, promotions all around!
In the more boring dystopia, the disincentivization would lead to poor quarterly financials and cause the same movement in the industry. Nobody is pumping out cola at a loss simply because it's their passion project.
Do we as a society even need [alcohol|nicotine|cannabis|refined sugar|fat|salt]?
Maybe not. But I refuse to believe that you asked that question in good faith, because we're obviously going to have all of them. People should be free to live as healthily or as unhealthily as they choose.
People should be free to live as unhealthily as they choose as long as the problems they inevitably create don’t negatively affect other people.
Activities high in negative externalities should be prohibitively expensive to help pay for remediation, and the opposite should be positively reinforced, even subsidized. A stitch, in time, saves nine.
> But I refuse to believe that you asked that question in good faith, because we're obviously going to have all of them. People should be free to live as healthily or as unhealthily as they choose.
Why? Especially in a country with government-subsidized healthcare?
We don't need a lot of things. A better example than plastic straws is beef: we definitely don't need beef, it's already expensive, and it has an extremely large and disproportionately heavy impact on CO2 consumption due to the combination of required grain, methane release, and needing land for cows incentivizing cutting down rainforest. Most people here would be pretty up in arms about any proposal to ban beef, so why focus on comparatively harmless stuff like lipstick and soda?
Some people need straws (kids, disabled people), but in most cases it's better to bring your own reusable straw to fill that need rather than relying on whatever straws they have at the place you are going to.
My toddler for example will just chew up most types of straws (especially those disgusting paper straws). Bringing a stainless steel, a glass straw, or one of those cups with integrated straw is a much better alternative.
People with movement disorders will probably want something more flexible, so I guess a reusable silicone straw is probably best.
In theory it can reduce tooth decay. In practice it only does so when drinking high sugar, high acid beverages, and if memory serves drinking a glass of water afterward is about as effective.
The only time I find it useful is when I’m driving while drinking a side I got at the fast food place I stopped at. It’s pretty easy to drive while drinking out of a straw.
Those cups in themselves are a pain. Why cant they just hand out PET bottles like you get everywhere else? (at least in europe)
hand out a reusable sport cap aswell and you have a perfect bottle without the need of
a) a straw
b) a cup
c) a lid
A bottle uses way more plastic than our flimsy plastic lids do. Paper cups are mostly paper which comes from trees which are grown just because there’s a need for paper (big carbon win).
It would be a massive step backward to use bottles instead of fountain drinks. Not to mention how much more expensive they are than a fountain drink. And there’s no way you could fill them efficiently from a fountain at the restaurant.
Now that you mention it, I did work with a person who had a condition that extremely affected his ability to move and yes, straw usage was essential for him.
It is clear there are some use cases where straw usage is a necessity.
I do wonder if that should just be something people use when they need it.
The analogy would be, some people use mobility scooters at the grocery store, but not everyone uses one, only the people who choose to them (presumably because they need it, but the point stands either way, need or want)
Most of the current lids on fast food togo cups these days don't work with my lip shape. It sounds funny but drinking from them especially while driving does not work, the drink just leaks out the corners of my mouth.
Please don't post unsusbtantive and/or flamebait comments, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
We've had to warn you about this many times in the past. Fortunately it looks like you've been doing it less lately, but please don't go back to posting the other way.
> usually attainable solution of reducing consumption.
Hell no.
I'm a real life example of this "unicorn" — someone so utterly uninterested in acquiring material things that I spent an average of €1131 per month on everything combined in the last six months. Rent, travel, food, new laptop… and I'm not even trying to be frugal, this is with a lot of eating out and organic groceries.
If everyone did what I did, not only would we still have wasteful straws (why were they in my mango lassis?), but also the economy would collapse immediately.
If everyone cuts back as far as I can when I last tried seriously, the economy breaks much harder.
I think you may have misread something; €1131 per month, of which €468 is rent and utilities (in Berlin, so still a good rate).
€7.6 euros per week for food is doable, I think, but last time I really tried to optimise that I was at university, in the UK, and it was 2003. (£0.50/day: Lidl instant noodles that they don't even sell any more, Quaker oats packs that aren't sold here, skimmed milk, dried fruit in the oats; I don't recommend reproducing this, it was a game to see how little I could spend without going hungry).
when I see the words "forever chemicals" in some writing I assume the use of emotive language is simply there to try to manipulate me and so whatever the opposite of what the article says is likely the truth
There's a small risk that raw pasta might be contaminated with E. Coli or Salmonella, but I assume that this risk is miniscule compared to the health risks of frequently consuming sugary drinks (with or without straws).
But so does our drinking water afaik. The real news is that
> PFAS are sometimes used as a water-resistant coating [on "paper" straws]
Surprised Pikachu that paper isn't water resistent (though then why do they melt in your mouth? Are those straws the pure paper variant?). What we need is for people to be able to reuse the things. Return the reusable straw to any McDonald's worldwide for dishwashing and reuse, for example, if we can't get people to bring it from home (the latter is my solution atm). Single use paper straws isn't more greenhouse gas efficient than single use thin plastic straws anyway, that was never going to be the answer even if it alleviates a decimal of a fraction of plastic trash issues
> PFAS were detected in almost all paper-based straws, with highly variable concentrations between brands, ranging from < LOQ(level of quantification) to 7.15 ng/g (Figure 1). PFOA was the most frequently detected component. Specific concentrations can be found in Supplementary Table A3. In the other types of straws, more often all PFAS were below the LOQ. In bamboo straws, PFAS were detected in the range < LOQ to 3.47 ng/g in four out of five brands. In glass straws two brands showed concentrations above the LOQ, ranging from < LOQ to 6.65 ng/g, while the concentrations for the other brands were found to be below the LOQ. In the stainless steel straws, no PFAS concentrations above the LOQ were observed in any of the brands. Finally, three out of four plastic straw brands contained quantifiable PFAS concentrations, ranging from < LOQ to 0.924 ng/g. There was a significant variation in PFAS profiles between straws from the same materials. This variation, in combination with the relatively small dataset, made it impossible to compare statistically the materials and continent of origin (CO) for each PFAS individually. Therefore, we used the ΣPFAS concentrations instead.
Is this a lot? What do these levels mean? "Detectable" isn't really a useful threshold for many chemicals. Also, how much of these chemicals am I likely to ingest? Does it depend on the type of drink, it's temperature and chemistry?
maximum contaminant level [MCL]. Straw weighs around .42 grams. I am not to concerned about the upper end of 7.15 ng/g contamination. By all means worry about PFAS if you wish, but straws really don't look like the problem.
Any place which serves paper straws (in my area) gets an automatic no-go.
Not interested in a business virtue signaling to superficial ecology preservation. It is akin to anti-gunners betting all in on stopping made up categories of firearms (assault weapons) which make up a tiny portion of murders. Whereas if they were serious they would focus on restrictions of hand-guns. The two stats of crime committed with both are NOT the same levels.
Consumer solutions for saving the planet result in greenwashing (distraction from actual meaningful change), new poisons, and growing waste through growing demand. Ecology isn't simply making correct purchasing decisions even if they feel good.
Solution: We used to have bottling plants everywhere, and the loop was "local city glass bottling-> sold drinks-> return bottle -> sanitize bottle -> repeat". Low waste, no plastic crap, and REUSE (of the 4 R's). But nope, it's cheaper to consume new material and throw it "away" AKA: our children or their children to deal with. Its not like they can vote to stop us.
This begs the question: why do we use straws at all? I'd be happier with a disposable sippable lid. Obviously a paradigm where we are rewarded for using our own containers would be best, but I am constraining to the baby steps that everyone is fond of.
Yeah, maybe aluminum straws wouldn't need to be lined with the same epoxy or polymer that aluminum cans are, since they wouldn't have to contain liquid long enough that oxidation is an issue?
Ceramic, as a glass, is valid too. Pottery I’m thinking as well but maybe with some caveats such as non-leaded paint.
Edit-I wish store items could be bought in reusable containers made from such materials. It would make groceries heavy and the cost of the containers might need to be “leased” some way (like old milk jugs were perhaps). But I’d do it.
A few big companies have tried to start packaging reuse programs with plastic containers and that didn’t work on a large scale because of all the cost and inconvenience… add in the weight and fragility of glass and you’re even farther from a cost-effective system.
Hadn't seen them myself. I do figure that if it were to work, it would require the customer side to be involved in the financing of it. Kind of like buying a growler for a local brew pub. That probably wouldn't scale to every item a person buys in a store perfectly - hence the "lease" term above. Need some flexibility on the corners.
