5 Reasons Why You Should Switch to Glass Containers

One such lifestyle change we can make is opting for glass containers instead of plastic ones. Glass is safer than and superior to plastic in a number of different ways, and it can benefit both you and the environment in ways that you may or may not expect.

Plastics are incredibly harmful to the environment

Aside from the patches of plastic waste floating like garbage islands in the oceans, there are so many other ways that plastic can harm nature. For one thing, plastic bottles can take over 450 years to disintegrate, and if they’ve already made their way into a landfill, disintegration can take up to a million years.

Meanwhile, plastics can also leach toxic chemicals into their environment. Plastic also has the ability to absorb toxins and pollutants that have spilled into the oceans, and researchers think it’s possible that plastic microparticles are in the air we breathe as well. In the far-off future, it’s possible that Earth’s sedimentary rocks will have a layer of plastic in them.

The production of glass is more environmentally-friendly

A lot of potentially harmful substances come out of the production of new plastic, such as methylene chloride, benzene, sulfur oxides, methanol, and several others. However, the production of glass doesn’t have the same impact. The manufacture of a glass jar, for example, produces five times less greenhouse gas emissions than the manufacture of a plastic container of the same size. Glass also needs only half the fossil fuels plastic needs in manufacturing.

Glass is truly recyclable

Because plastic isn’t biodegradable, it’s thus recyclable. Maybe, therefore, it’s not so bad? Maybe, but it’s not that simple. Plastic loses integrity each time it’s recycled. When plastic bottles, for example, are sent off to be recycled, they no longer have the same quality as they did before they were recycled. Thus, they need to be turned into something else, like carpet padding.

Thus, each plastic bottle we get our hands on is all-new plastic -- plastic that will take longer than we can imagine to completely disintegrate. However, glass isn’t like that. When we recycle glass, it doesn’t lose its quality. A glass jar can be recycled into another glass jar, maybe even two. Not every glass container was recycled, but the point is that it can be.

Glass doesn’t leach chemicals

Plastic containers can leach chemicals not only into the environment, but into their contents as well. This can happen especially when you transfer hot substances into a plastic container, or when you microwave food in plastic. Food, drinks, cosmetics, and other things packaged in plastic may contain traces of chemicals found in the packaging, and these chemicals can be toxic.

The same isn’t true of glass containers, since glass contains far fewer toxic substances that won’t leach out of the glass anyway.

You can use glass for a longer period of time

At some point, we have to dispose of plastic containers. They may have gotten warped due to hot contents, or they may also have gotten discolored due to years of use. Plastic can also absorb and house potentially harmful microbes, which means that using plastic containers for a long time isn’t a good idea.

Glass, as long as you don’t break it, can stay functional for years and years. Even if it does break, the shards can be recycled to make a new class container. Though not all glass is recycled, un-recycled glass can stay in the environment for a very long time without causing harm (unless you happen to step on them).