Should alcohol in glass bottles be banned // should plastic bottles be mandated? - Page 3

The main problem seems to be pub brawl injuries. There's really nothing practical that can be done about littering by getting rid of glass, and stopping mutilations and deaths would be preferable, IMO.

How about this: If you buy glass bottles from a shop, they're your property, and whatever you do with them is your responsibility. We have laws that punish misuse.

In a bar though, the glassware belongs to the establishment. It's not yours to smash, and you could argue that the bar has an OH&S obligation to ensure the safety of its customers.

A solution would be to exchange bar glassware for plastic tumblers, and only serve drinks off tap, not out of bottles. The barkeep would pour your drink for you, then take the bottle away.

Using plastic would be the fault of every corporation and person, and is only useful because it doesn't smash when people litter with it. We'd be creating a very real problem for a silly benefit.

Using glass only becomes a problem when assholes get involved. And you COULD sweep up broken glass and recycle it, or help engineer glass that fragments less, or something intelligent.

Frankly, I'd rather tackle the issue of getting rid of or punishing assholes as opposed to creating environmental cluster*bleep*s.

Plastic is not an environmentally friendly alternative either. Also it is the worst drink container. Especially for anything alcoholic. Drinks go stale quicker sealed in plastic. They retain heat more. Not as easy to chill. Also when you cheers. Tapping plastic is lame. D=

I also agree with Sonic Flash. Better to just sweep the morons than be moron-proof.

For starters beer taste terrible in a plastic cups. Secondly drop kicks will still go around smashing heads in whether they have a glass bottle or not. Just throw these people in jail instead of slapping them on the wrist and punishing all the decent people with plastic cups.
Thirdly if some places still cannot handle glasses, make them individual places use plastic instead of punishing decent places by forcing plastic on everyone. I already avoid a local bar because they use plastic cups. Not my fault their clientele are *bleep*ed in the head.

For personal biases, I've stepped on a discarded broken glass bottle, while barefoot. I received several penetrating wounds and had to limp a few hundred yards home to get it cleaned out and treated. Oddly, no stitches, and my father was a pediatrician so could have done it with no problem if needed.
While I'm not a beer drinker (recent forays into the world of microbrews might change that), I agree with silverboner that things taste better in glass bottles. Even now in the hotel, I put water in the fridge to have cold water, and I use glass Snapple bottles rather than the plastic bottles I have available. I haven't done any blind taste testing, so that could be a tactile illusion.

I don't count barfight issues in my decisions on this... we already have laws to deal with barfights, and as far as I know it's a relatively minor amount of bottle risk. And as KR_1250 points out, there are lots of other items in the bar that people can use to hit other humans.

So from there we're left with danger of sharp broken bottles vs danger of plastic, recyclability of each, and the effects on the contained drinks.

Most plastics stick around for a while and cause a problem with trash in the environment. Now we do have plastics w/o that problem... but I imagine those break down faster under the influence of acidic drinks, so are more of an issue with taste & health of the product inside.
Glass on the other hand is about the same environmental danger level as obsidian. While dangerous to humans in the short term, it gets polished smooth just like any other sharp rock with similar level of hardness. Even with no human intervention, the effects are minimal at the decades level, and long term effects are non-existant.

Chemically speaking, glass is more recyclable than most plastics. Some areas have stopped recycling it due to potential injury from shards, but that's the main problem I'm familiar with.
There are some plastics that are very recycleable, however looking at companies that tried to go that way, they weren't using it for storage, and they have switched to non-plastic materials since then. I think we have a ways to go before this is viable, and that's not including the fact that the way plastic recycles, added recyclability comes with increased plastic in acidic drinks.

I do like northern49's idea... contain the glass so shards don't get out into the environment. I think it would be better to put the containment inside the glass though... for example the PVB layer that helps prevent your car windshield from fragmenting when broken.