I know they’re supposed to be good for the environment. But… Holy smokes they drive me up the wall. They really do!
I had no trouble adapting when aluminum can pull-tabs got replaced by push-tabs, because it was pretty much the same movement, and I could see the immediate advantage of not getting cut by a pull-tab.
But the tethered cap is fighting decades of muscle memory in me: I’m used to taking the cap off with one hand and keeping it there while taking a swig with the other. Now I unscrew the cap with one hand, but I still have to hold the cap so it’s out of the way. It feels like drinking in handcuffs each and every time…
So unlike the pull-tab, the tethered plastic bottle cap is one of those compulsory eco solutions that constantly make you feel ever-so-slightly more miserable all the time, and I hate that because ecology only works when it brings something of value both to people and to the environment.
Glass is a bugger to recycle as even little admixtures of the wrong stuff can spoil the whole batch. Crush it up and it’s very useful as aggregate in concrete, though. In the case of glass it’s much better to reuse than recycle.
Glas is also heavy meaning it costs more energy to transport, overall PET bottles actually have a quite good environmental and climate record provided they actually get recycled.
Stainless steel is also infinitely recyclable and should be able to be used without liners. Shouldn’t even be heavier than aluminium cans as steel and aluminium are ballpark equally strong by weight (aluminium is stiffer though, not necessarily an advantage). PET is probably going to need less energy of all when recycling, though.
Problem is the stainless steel you’d need to use in order to get the corrosion resistance and non-reactivity with the contents is prohibitively expensive. Cheap stainless steel alloys offer pretty poor corrosion resistance - see the CyberTruck rusting after being rained on a few times.
Hmm. Random price for 1.4571 (probably complete overkill): 20 Euro/kg. Let’s say we use a bit more material than current alu cans, 20g per, that’s 50 cans per kg or 40ct per can quite a bit more than the 25ct deposit we currently have on cans. OTOH that was a random price for 50cm of round stock of the right diameter to get to 1kg, if you’re actually buying it in bulk from the mill it should be quite a bit cheaper (also while you’re at it get sheets). Doubly so if you can feed that mill with very pure recycling material they barely have to touch to get up to spec again.
I’d say it’s doable.
If you use approximately the same amount of material as in an aluminum can, you’re already at 3x the weight of an aluminum can. Stainless is also far less malleable and much more brittle than aluminum, so the minimum wall thickness is much higher for steel. Aluminum can walls are 0.11m thick, whereas the minimum wall thickness for stainless steel alloys is around 0.50mm thick. Meaning you’d need around 4.5 times as much material, making the stainless steel can weigh at least 10 times as much as the average 15 gram aluminum can. A 12-pack of soda would weigh 4.5 pounds more. Now imagine how much transporting that extra weight costs.
Stainless steel is great for reusable stuff, but it’d be impractical at the same scale as aluminum cans.