Petition for plastic Buckfast bottles, as featured on the BBC

[Alan]

A woman from Lanarkshire in Scotland has started a petition to force Buckfast abbey to use plastic bottles instead of glass. This drink is particularly popular here (for some reason) and the bottles cause problems with litter and also have been known to be used as weapons.

Read the BBC story here (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/4753439.stm) but don't forget to sign the petition here (http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/safer_buckfast/).

Thanks

[cubix]

What is Buckfast? Beer

Well, here in the states, it's a struggle to find any drinks in glass bottles except for beer, and even now it's moving to plastic or the cans.

Even though soda tastes better in a bottle, I think there were a lot of issues. I would also assume that glass costs more

[Alan]

It's tonic wine. Think: alcoholic cough medicine. It's horrible stuff, but it's the drink of choice among Scottish neds. I don't know why, because I can think of cheaper drinks that taste a lot better and are stronger in alcohol, if that's what they're looking for.

I bet you can buy a bottle of table wine in the glass variety. This is, by definition, wine. English wine though. English tonic wine. I don't want to do damage to England's wine-making heritage, but you know, I don't buy Spanish whisky, so why buy English wine?

Stick to gin England :P

[JanesDaddy]

Miss Graham wants the company to show social responsibility. What about environmental responsibility? Ever piece of plastic that was ever produced is still on or in the earth. It will take thousands of years to degrade and go away. Glass, on the other hand, can be recycled easily to make new glass.

[Alan]

Miss Graham wants the company to show social responsibility. What about environmental responsibility? Ever piece of plastic that was ever produced is still on or in the earth. It will take thousands of years to degrade and go away. Glass, on the other hand, can be recycled easily to make new glass.
Plastic can be easily recycled to make new plastic :) And I don't THINK glass is biodegradable, but correct me if I'm wrong.

I don't mean to be pedantic - I agree fully with your sentiment. That is a very important issue too, but I think the argument is that at least you can pick up a plastic bottle and put it in the bin easily. Not so with glass. In Lanarkshire, plastic and other materials are recycled as a matter of course, so the plastic would find its way out of the landfills. Most of it anyway. We have different lorries which come round the houses to pick up different types of rubbish. Over the last 10 years, we're taking recycling very seriously.

And of course, plastic is safer. The neds want to drink on the street and when they're finished, they have a glass bottle in their hands. Not smart.

It is possible to make recyclable biodegradable plastics, and maybe we should be getting onto the plastic bottle manufacturers about that.

[richardksa]

But glass is easily recyclable. I visited the Perrier bottling plant in Southern France and was amazed to discover that no bottle is reused. Every returned bottle is crushed and melted down at the glassworks next door and passes by converor into the bottling shed. The glass is still warm when it is being filled.

As regards is biodegrability (if there is such a word), it might not rot, but it does erode. I work in a desert and often find the worn away remnants of old bottles eroded by countless standstorms. However, for them to completely disintegrate would take hundreds of years, so recycling is probably better.

[Alan]

Yeah, the sandstorms in Scotland aren't quite as fierce :)

Ach, I don't know. I'm all for recycling. But you should see the mess caused by broken bottles. They're not as easy to clean up. But the plastic bottles and cans ARE removed from the streets and they are recycled.

[ValenciaSon]

Aren't plastic bottles more fossil-fuel intensive both in their production and recycling processes?

[Marina]

I believe that glass is much ecologically cleaner than plastic and it can be easily recicled if appropriate bins are provided. Plus plastic bottles can disolve nasty particles in your drink if they've been left in the heat, for example while they are transported.

I sitll find wierd that a common solution in the UK to a problem like a bottle being "dangerous" is removing bottles, that is covering the problem but not solving it. Still if someone wants to get a glass bottle they can use an empty bottle of wine for example. Don't you think that it should be through education that this kind of problem should be solved???

[richardksa]

In my childhood it was common to return empty pop bottle for a small cash reibursement and so recycling occured naturally. Then that stopped as it was too much trouble and now we have a waste problem. Progress is not always better.