Boxed water & the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

[prwhite]

Two Sides—an organization that tries to set the record straight about paper being an Earth-friendly, recycled, renewable resource—recently did an interview about boxed water with the company’s CMO. Boxed water seems like a great idea, and here is a company that’s actually making it happen. Although it’s pricey, at least someone is packaging water in biodegradable, paper boxes.

Now, it needs to get distributed widely enough to take a bite out of our global, plastic bottle problem that comprises a significant part of the 5 trillion pieces of trash that hit our globe’s oceans annually, forming the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Paper is not only good for the printing industry, it’s also good for our oceans.

 

[Deleted member 16349]

Two Sides—an organization that tries to set the record straight about paper being an Earth-friendly, recycled, renewable resource—recently did an interview about boxed water
seems like a great idea, and here is a company that’s actually making it happen. Although it’s pricey, at least someone is packaging water in biodegradable, paper boxes.

Boxed water is not new. I worked for Tetra Pak and they filled their packages with water over thirty years ago. The packaging material was a similar laminated construction. An interesting note. When considering the "off taste" of liquids in these kinds of packages, water and wine are the most sensitive to the chemicals of the packaging materials. For testing of "off taste", groups of people who have experience doing these kinds of tests, evaluate the levels of off taste. Due to its sensitivity, water was always used for these tests. It was critical that the polyethylene used in production was manufactured in a special way so that there was a minimum of short chain molecules, which tended to affect off taste. Not all producers of poly had the technology required to manufacture poly to the required specifications.

Back to the issue in the article. I do find it hard to believe that water in a box is better than water in a fully plastic bottle. IMO it is much easier to recycle a plastic bottle than to recycle a paper, poly and aluminum foil package.

 

[Slammer]

The question is not so much about the recycling, sadly when all is considered making a new container, be it plastic bottle or tetrapak, is environmentally more friendly than recycling. Same with the alarming drive for electric vehicles, a eight year old car with a small petrol engine has by far the lesser footprint that a new electric car. Thing is when you start to make so-called "bio degradable" packaging you still need gigatons of raw materials, all that wood and sugar for the manufacturing process needs to come from somewhere, mainly from lesser developed countries with far laxer environment laws. There is no way around it, the system falls apart at some point in the process. And all because too many people need too much stuff taken from too small a planet.
A solution would be to either cull Earths population to around a billion and make it stay that way or we de-evolve and go back to the trees.
Way to go God, creator of mankind, you got us in a fine mess with this whole intelligence and free will thing.