The issue is that while you can drink out of glassware or ceramics (I enjoy those for my coffee and tea), basically everything is carted around in plastic.
If you want to buy water when you're out and about and want it in a glass bottle, your only choices are the "premium" brands that cost an arm and a leg.
And, more generally, it's pretty darn hard to avoid plastics when buying food. When I was a kid, when my parents bought meat from the butcher, it would be wrapped in actual paper, or close enough that it would become unusable once home, and they had to move the meat to solid containers. Nowadays, that "paper" seems to be able to withstand whatever you throw at it. Packaged meats and cheeses always come wrapped in some kind of plastic. The only food I still see in glass containers are "canned" vegetables.
Even if you avoid plastic in the final retail product, there is a pretty good chance the raw materials were transported from the source or within processing facilities in plastic or plastic-lined containers.
In this study recycled glass bottles were not better when it comes to microplastics. It's everywhere. In lids, detergents etc. In fact, single-use plastic bottles did best!
Except we didn't; wine and spirits come almost exclusively in glass bottles, beer is frequently in glass (although cans are also used), almost every store will have some sodas and bottled water in glass, most people at home and restaurants use glasses made from, well, glass, etc.
Glass is a little bit better at keeping oxygen out than plastic, dark glass keeps UV rays at bay, and thick glass bottles can better withstand the pressure of a second fermentation in the bottle, as with champagne and abbey beers. It also looks nice. These are advantages for beer and wine, but mostly irrelevant for soda, water and juices.
Maybe it's some mass illusion, but most people say that drinking from glass bottles tastes significantly better. Personally cans taste bad, plastic somewhat better.
Cans are lined with plastic on the inside, otherwise aluminium would react with acidic soda. There is no practical difference in that regard between a plastic bottle and an aluminium can lined with plastic
I like drinking from a can; your mouth still touches the metal while you drink, so while the flavour of the liquid as such is unaffected, it still changes the overall "flavour experience" (for either better or worse, depending on personal tastes).
If you pour it out in a glass it makes no difference.
It's easy to purchase Mexican sodas around here, and these are never in plastic. Also the more upscale or organic soda companies such as Jones or Reed's, always glass.
I don't use drugs. But my understanding is that plastic bottles aren't exactly uncommon even for spirits. And then with wines you get the boxed stuff. A carboard box, with plastic/foil bag inside.
I do use drugs. I have never seen spirits in a plastic bottle, even own brand super market vodka.
Boxed wine exists, and is a bit under half the market (by volume). Wine in glasses is still the majority of sales. Beer/cider/larger is sold in cans or bottles, with cans being about 2/3rd by volume.
I do drugs as well, but I don't typically drink alcohol. Maybe I am not qualified to speak on this, but in the US most of the cheap vodkas have been coming in plastic bottles for around 15 years now at least.
Hm... I think in Europe most if not all of the alcohol comes in glass (or also still sometimes a tin can). Only some beer is in plastic bottles, but most would say that is a sin and a no go and never touch it.
I've only seen plastic bottles for very small bottles: the type you get in a mini-bar or airplane. If you go to a supermarket or off-license you typically won't find non-glass bottles for regular-sized wine or spirits.
Glass is awesome. It's reusable many times over and recyclable after that. We used to have systems to allow that reuse (bottle return) before somehow we ended up throwing away a plastic bottle (recycled at best) every time we buy a pint of milk.
And contrary to sibling comment, glass containers don't leach heavy metals (or anything else) into food.
Plastic bottles are more environmentally friendly.
Glass requires massively more energy to manufacture, even using 100% recycled glass. Glass is heavy, so it's more expensive to transport. Collecting and washing bottles for re-use consumes a substantial amount of energy, which greatly increases the number of trips required to break even on the higher manufacturing impacts. The lifespan of a re-usable glass bottle is relatively very short, because glass is fragile. Glass compares poorly to HDPE when we factor in a realistic lifespan for glass and a realistic recycling rate for HDPE.
They are currently, but only because we're crap at reuse. Glass bottles are highly reusable - 15 times or more on average - before they need to be recycled (i.e. melted).
Minimising the transport costs is part of the design of the reuse process. Milk floats are a great example of this. Milk delivered to the door by an electrical vehicle daily and empties collected by the same vehicle, washed and refilled. This was the standard way to get milk (and often juice, eggs, etc) in my childhood but nowadays people throw a plastic bottle into a generic recycling stream every time and I highly doubt it's an improvement.
Online grocery shopping reduces fuel usage and pollution for getting goods to homes by consolidating many deliveries in one vehicle round. It would be great to see this being used (again) as a way of improving packaging efficiency too, one way or another.
It's much heavier to cart around, which must be factored in. There's absolutely nothing inherently harmful in single use plastics if they get properly disposed of in landfill.
Driving heavy glass back and forth from the bottling plant burns a lot of diesel unnecessarily.
That's what the grandparent sensibly referred to as reuse; you can do that, but you after you're done reusing it, you can also recycle it, that is, melt it down and make new glass from it.
There is absolutely a difference in perception, especially noticeable with metal/non-metal.
Drink a soda from a can and then the same kind from a glass? Night and day. Try experimenting with spoons to eat: wooden, plastic, different metals. You really notice that, or you should: the spoon goes right on your tongue to introduce the food.
What? Definitely happens, latest when one of the cheaper thinner bottle types have been sitting a bit too long in the hot the plastic taste becomes intense.
And even if below noticing levels I think plastic molecules have been detected in such beverages, but uncertain here.
Which is sometimes unavoidable, but to be precise, the same even on hot days without direct sun exposure, lets stop pea counting. You will easily find studies that stuff from PET production like acetaldehyde goes into the beverage and impacts taste.
But certainly also kind of what you are used to, always surprising for some folks to learn that for others chlorine water is associated with freshness, while clean water is a bit foul.
This is true only for old or expensive crystal glasses.
Most common soda-lime glass has negligible amounts of undesirable impurities, while borosilicate glass, like I use for my food and drinks, is even more pure and it contains almost nothing besides oxides of silicon, boron, sodium and aluminum, and it is inert in contact with food.
In short, only the enamelled decorations may contain heavy metals, which leech in the environment after use. This is a serious problem, but not with glass as such.
