Plastic bottles must be
The plastic bottle made of polyethylene terephthalate is on everyone's lips; both literally and figuratively. Germany's most popular drink after Doppelkorn and 98-octane super has been causing a dilemma since the end of the 1980s that is reaching a new climax in this outgoing decade: water made of glass or plastic?
Consumption of the PET packaging for drinks, affectionately abbreviated like a pet (meaning not that the packaging is eaten, but that the contents are drunk) simply will not and will not go down. And that is a good thing. The costs that manufacturers would have to bear to adjust their filling lines to a new bottle look would be almost as high as the development of new materials, almost 0.0001 cents per bottle for a consumption of 2.5 litres per capita per year (for comparison: beer consumption in Germany is 13 litres per capita per year - just for all inhabitants aged 0 and over). And one must also understand the industry, which is in competition with cancer research and which, for its part, wants to prove that the leaky packaging cannot be healthy. The plasticisers, which have long since been banned, make long-term studies difficult, and so there is a compulsion to constantly improve the transparent containers so that a well-known composition does not become the trigger for new scandals.
The pressure from the EU
Whereas in the beginning only sugary soft drinks were filled into the porous stuff so that the perceptible taste of the diffusing chemicals (methanol, carbon dioxide, O-methyluretane and acetaldehyde) would not be so noticeable because these substances are contained in fruits or used for sterilisation, today experts simply warn against throwing away stale, plastic or wine vinegar tasting drinks and using unmarked bottles - as if someone were looking for the transparent embossing of a PET bottle.
Germany, as the pioneer of bad conscience, has enforced in the EU that the circulation of PET products is radically increased, because otherwise the glass bottle-filling manufacturers could not have been brought to their knees. For only with the appropriate circulation is it possible that heavy industry continues to take over the lion's share of thermal recycling, for which consumers pay so wonderfully cost-savingly with packaging tax and waste collection costs, and that the empty shells do not have to be exported as development aid to China, where they are used in the textile industry or, even worse, installed as ventilation systems in India.
What works in Germany - what doesn't?
Upcycling in developing and emerging countries is a thorn in the side of the industrial nations anyway. The fact that people make a virtue out of necessity and instead of throwing the bottles into the rivers so that they end up in the sea and we get to see memorable pictures of rubbish carpets, simply use them to convert their walls into air conditioners according to the funnel system is not permitted under German building regulations.
So here, too, there is no problem with so-called microplastics, which are produced when shredded bottle remains are processed into fibres for clothing. This is because no serious clothing manufacturer would produce in Germany given the strict regulations on working conditions, material and processing guidelines.
Even when wearing garments woven in Asia, some of these small particles rub off, are absorbed by the skin, inhaled, get into the rivers and the sea via rain, where they are absorbed and stored by fish, which we eat afterwards and cannot digest, or enter this cycle when washing at the latest.
What is the solution?
So we have to continue to buy what we are offered. After all, the industry knows exactly what we need and only wants our best.