A little over a month ago, I began drinking sparkling water (agua con gas) instead of wine.
I love the vastly reduced clink-clank of bottle recycling, and the cash savings will certainly buy a little sushi, but I didn’t feel good about the single-use plastic water bottles from the supermarket. Given tightening purity standards in China for recyclables, many municipalities up north have gone from making a little selling recyclables, to paying much more to send them to a landfill.
I don’t know the status here. I don’t know if plastic is really recycled, and if so, where (but they seemed serious about it last I checked, seven years ago). But then I remembered how we got drinking water before I installed filters: the water guy who comes around every Monday morning.
He brings pressurized bottles like the one on the left. Total waste is reduced from a bottle with three types of plastic, to a little piece of plastic wrap. Plus the water stays fizzier because the bottle is pressurized. Also it costs less. And the delivery guy is friendly and helpful. For example, after starting delivery only a few weeks ago, we were out last Monday morning. We returned to find six bottles of water at our doorstep, to be paid this week, no problem.
So how many times can these pressurized bottles be re-used? I have no idea. However, this is one delivered today:
Notice the phone number. Phone numbers in Uruguay no longer begin with zero. In fact, they haven’t since late 2010. So, chances are these bottles have been around a while.
I like that.
While cruising in the eighties, we would buy a crate of soda in glass bottles, taking the crate of empties ashore where they were returned, and we were reimbursed some money, to the bottling company for wash & refill.
While this idea of recycling is wonderful, we discovered that you had to gt rid of all the bottles before sailing off to the next country, where they would only take their own bottles, although same size.
Interesting insight! But soda – I’ll bet you don’t even touch the stuff anymore!
have you asked if the water guy could stopper/cork the fizzy once a week bottles with something other than a wad of plastic? a reuseable hard plastic cork? sounds like a great plan, except for the non-recycle-able wad of plastic…
round and round we go.
My bad – it’s not actually a wad of plastic, it’s a tiny bit of the type of film they use to shrink-wrap 6-packs (best example I can think of) only thinner. Other than cling (“Saran”) wrap – which wouldn’t seal – it seems to me a pretty elegant solution for keeping the business end clean as the bottles ride around in the back of an open delivery truck.
Re-use: I love going to Tienda Inglesa and handing the cashier a used plastic shopping bag for my groceries. Alas, not so practical at Disco, where the bags split to pieces if you so much as look at them crosseyed (don’t ask; I never said I wasn’t weird).