Bottles Up

I don't collect bottles, because if I went down that rabbit hole I would never come out and if you did find me, it would be with a pair of long ears and a stubby, fuzzy tail somewhere in Watership Down.

That said, I do have a few on the shelves in my kitchen among the odds and ends of my smallish teapot and pitcher collection. One that my mom got for me… a Lydia Pinkham snake oil flask to remind me that I used to study the history of advertising…a blue glass water bottle I brought back from my one trip to Germany…and these two:

I don't remember when or where I got them, exactly, but it must have been at an antique store somewhere in the area near Endicott and Binghamton, New York, since they're bottles for products from those two places, the Endicott Creamery on the left and Jos. Laurer Brewing of Binghamton on the right.

I'm not from either place, but close enough that they're meaningful to me, so I've kept them through the years I've been out here in Minnesota.

But today, when I was cleaning around them near the kitchen sink, what they made me think was this: 100 years ago when these bottles were made, every town of any size in the U.S. had a place that could make these customized bottles out of raw material (sand). They were collected, returned, and reused multiple times. They're still here, although I imagine many broke at some point. But they're heavy and thick-walled, and there's a reason for that. 

These days we use 50 billion plastic bottles a year just for water in the U.S. (that's 1,500 per second). For water. Which doesn't even have to be in a bottle, and buying it in a bottle costs you 1,000 times more than drinking it from your tap. 17 million barrels of oil are used to make those plastic bottles each year.

I never got around to linking to that overwhelmingly outraging NPR story from a month ago, about how plastic recycling is basically a lie. So if you haven't read it... you really should. Essentially, it documented how it's financially cheaper to make plastic out of new oil than it is to make it out of old plastic, that old plastic is hard to work with for a range of reasons, and that oil companies wanted to sell oil so they have undermined recycling while pretending to promote it. Since the early 1970s. 

The headline of the story is How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled.

Recycling glass is much better than recycling plastic because recycled plastic isn't really made into new plastic, it's down-cycled into other products, while glass gets reused as glass and it needs less energy than making new glass from raw material. Note that the weight and breakability of glass make it less good of a recycled product than recycled aluminum, though, when you take shipping and handling into consideration (source). But as that source shows, if you can't get recycled cans — given where the bauxite comes from to make new cans — glass is the most responsible container, especially if it's locally made.

Reusing glass — even just a few times — is even better than recycling it, obviously. We used to be able to do this, as evidenced by the bottles still in my kitchen and that were in every city and town across this country 100 years ago. They and how they are made should be part of a Green New Deal, and that doesn't get talked about enough. 

Let's bring them back, updated in ways I'm not imagining, maybe. But let's bring them back.

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Jos. Laurer Brewing was in business from 1894 to 1920 (source). I couldn't find a date online for the Endicott Creamery, but I bet if I could go to the library in Endicott, they would know.