(Apologies for the downtime yesterday – our hosting provider had a huge hardware failure. As I also work for our hosting provider, I was stressed from both sides – not a good day!)

We’ve had an email from Jo:

Hi. Got a question for you. Is it better to buy pop in big bottles or cans from a packaging point of view? Big bottles seem like less waste for the amount of liquid but are plastic. Your thoughts?

Neither are great for a number of reasons. Aside from the actual waste from the packaging, it’s really resource-intensive to ship around liquid in anything other than pipes – and the production tends to be pretty bad for the environment too, let’s not forget about the production.

But to the question in hand, both the plastic and metal are non-renewable resources, the creation of which is very destructive to the environment, but both can be recycled and are widely collected. If though, you can only recycle one or the other in your local area, that might sway you one way or the other.

The easiest way to reduce the waste is, of course, to reduce consumption of the drinks in the first place. Or make them at home – either getting the fizz through a natural process (like making homemade ginger beer) or a less natural one.

I usually prefer bottles – we don’t drink much fizzy stuff at all and when we do have it, prefer little amounts rather than full cans – and even though we no longer have doorstep recycling of plastics, plastic bottles have more reuses around the home and garden.

Anyone else got any input? What about suggestions for reducing the amount of fizzy drinks drunk – what are similar but better alternatives?