PP21: Bottled

Now this isn’t strictly an environmental issue, but I want to write it down all the same. I support the police in their recent request that glass bottles for beers and alcopops be replaced with plastic ones. Now for many people this may seem like the nanny state gone totally mad - now they won’t even let us use glass! What next? Will they take our writing pens away and give us pencils? Should we put the stabilisers back on our bikes?

I thought it was total insanity when I first heard about it. But I have come round to the idea after realising that the savings to be made are substantial. Glass bottles can of course be used as quite an effective weapon during bar brawls and drunken fights. The ambulances, the ambulance staff, the extra A&E waiting times, the patching up of casualties and long term physical and psychological effects of injury all make for a pretty large bill. Add to this the time the police and courts spend dealing with these extra assault cases and I think you’ll agree that we pay a very high price for the luxury of enjoying glass bottles. (I’d also like to factor in the price of punctured bike tyres!)

Sure, fights will still happen and other things will be found as weapons. But I think the risk of injury will almost certainly go down. To argue otherwise is like saying that Americans might as well be allowed to keep their guns, because they will just find other ways of killing each other. We know that to be false since every single piece of evidence suggests otherwise.

Plastic bottles, while admittedly made from crude oil, can be recycled just as easily as glass ones and they also weigh less, allowing them to be distributed with greater ease and with less green house emissions. So long as we perhaps also insist that these new plastic bottles must be made from a certain percentage of recycled materials then I think we can offset many of the downsides. I see it as a simple switch that can save a lot of time, money and effort. And cuts and bruises.