I’m not sure this is a straw man, but I think it’s reasonable to argue that it could be considered one, given that the study talks about single-use glass whereas the meme is specifically showing a glass bottle that gets reused.
From the study itself:
Glass bottles, both virgin and recycled had high impacts compared to all other product systems, however thisdoes not consider the potential of reusing the glass bottles.
Given that page 56 shows that a brand new glass milk bottle is about 4x as impactful as their suggested alternative (carton) and a recycled one is about twice as impactful we can say that even using the lower bound of 20 mentioned in the study of reuses, the extra transport and cleaning would need to have at least 80% the impact of manufacturing a carton before reusable glass bottles could be considered worse than single-use cartons. Taking more optimistic values for glass (40 reuses of recycled glass), it’s more like 95%.
The study does mention how reuse of glass can reduce the impact:
The LCA by Mata and Costa, (2001) found that reused glass bottle schemes had far lower impacts in all tested impact categories scoped into that study, than non-re- turned glass systems. Whilst this study was undertaken under the former ISO standards, it still indicates that reuse of glass would be beneficial, especially when compared to single use glass bottles.
It talks about more complex logistics, but we have literally done this before and we still have communities that do this today. The logistics aren’t complex enough to make them unfeasible - we simply need to put in incentives that make it more profitable for businesses to include reuse in their logistics. One example of that would be a packaging waste tax. When sold by the manufacturer, a tax gets included that covers the cost of disposal of packaging. The company then gets a credit for each reuse.
I’m not sure this is a straw man, but I think it’s reasonable to argue that it could be considered one, given that the study talks about single-use glass whereas the meme is specifically showing a glass bottle that gets reused.
From the study itself:
Given that page 56 shows that a brand new glass milk bottle is about 4x as impactful as their suggested alternative (carton) and a recycled one is about twice as impactful we can say that even using the lower bound of 20 mentioned in the study of reuses, the extra transport and cleaning would need to have at least 80% the impact of manufacturing a carton before reusable glass bottles could be considered worse than single-use cartons. Taking more optimistic values for glass (40 reuses of recycled glass), it’s more like 95%.
The study does mention how reuse of glass can reduce the impact:
It talks about more complex logistics, but we have literally done this before and we still have communities that do this today. The logistics aren’t complex enough to make them unfeasible - we simply need to put in incentives that make it more profitable for businesses to include reuse in their logistics. One example of that would be a packaging waste tax. When sold by the manufacturer, a tax gets included that covers the cost of disposal of packaging. The company then gets a credit for each reuse.