We are often told that the big things tend to come from the little things – and environmental care-taking is no different.
For decades, the booming business of recycling is beginning to take centre-stage – and its players, namely yourself, have the wonderful task of remembering what needs to be propped into where. In recent years, companies have also been given the same lecture and some have taken action.
Today, it is quite common to see the traditional green arrows chasing one another on a carton, as corporations have taken to repackaging their items with biodegradable material. For some however, there are raised brows about whether or not plastic containers are safe for the environment.
Nobody likes something that can crack, shatter and make an unpleasant sound in one go, but for individuals such as the Guardian’s Lucy Siegle, the safer alternative to plastic is glass.
“I urge you to remain a glass purist,” she postulates, “While it’s hard to stem the rising tide of plastic packaging, plastic waste – from bottles to the tiny beads called mermaid’s tears – is wreaking havoc on oceans especially. Nothing against PET, the most widely used and recycled plastic… but glass wins for me.”
Plastic is a hard item to recycle, with material that is unable to be recycled. Furthermore, the creation, let alone the recycling of plastic requires the distribution and use of fossil fuels and water (mostly from cooling power plants) that in turn, pump more problems into the atmosphere.
Glass on the other hand, is a substance built predominantly from natural materials such as sand, limestone and soda ash. Despite its capacity to shatter (mostly from being butterfingered), the material has the capacity to keep everything fresh, whilst doing away with the oiliness that can be sometimes equated with plastic materials.
Overall, glass produces leagues less in carbon dioxide than plastic does – this should not close curtains on recycling materials, but instead, choosing what you can recycle in the first place.