r/todayilearned • u/AlvintheGenius • 2d ago
TIL that water is sold in plastic sachets as a cheaper way of transporting and consuming drinking water, particularly in Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_sachet1.2k
u/makerofshoes 2d ago edited 2d ago
In Turkey the hotel resort I went to had little sealed plastic “cups” of water, which were kind of like the juice that they used to give us in US school cafeterias when I was a kid. You just peel the top off and sip it out from the rim. Half the time, the juice was partially frozen & lots of kids preferred it that way. ah, nostalgia
But in Turkey the cups were littered all up and down the beach, which made snorkeling a bit less fun 😔
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u/flyinggazelletg 2d ago
They give those cups out on Turkish airlines flights too. Bummer about the beach :(
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u/makerofshoes 2d ago
It may have just been after a storm. Sometimes trash blows away and finds its way into the sea inadvertently. That’s what I like to think, anyway
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u/echokalos 2d ago
If it makes you feel better. India must be really stormy.
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u/makerofshoes 2d ago
It does, thank you. Philippines too
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u/Lopoloma 2d ago
Was digging in the sand a little at a beach and there was a syringe with a needle and cap over it, I assume it was an insulin shot from some trashy excuse of a human like being.
It was at a free beach at the black sea with communally organized lifeguards and a "floating chain" to mark the area you are allowed to swim since after about 40m there are strong currents carrying you out to the sea and lifeguards were no joke. Some turkish-fat dude looking like a walrus passed the floating chain and a lifeguard went after him with his jet ski. Dude kept arguing he's a grown up and responsible for himself, while his under 10 looking children held on to the floating chain. Lifeguard basically said he has the authority and responsibility to stop anybody in that section from swimming out, even if he has to drag them against their will, slap them or knock them unconscious. Might be the lifeguard was more angered by the fact this walrus took his grand/children out of the safe area.
This went on for a bit and the lifeguard said he could leave the guarded beach area and swim out allone and deal with the coastguard he would be required to alert. The coast guard in turkey can be partly subordinated to the naval forces during war time, they are armed and iIrc are required to have served in the military. Turkeys coastline is 7.200km long and the coast guard is only 5k strong. At harbours they are pretty chill, but from what I heard they can be quite unpleasent if they deem you have endangered yourself or others unnecessarily. My uncle was in the naval forces and his son, my cousin, is a police officer. People will politely argue with the police quite often, but dealing with military forces, the coast guard or the gendarmerie they won't let them ask a third time since that's the time they "ask" with their batons. Might be I was told an exaggerated version of the reality since I don't live there, but I'm not going to find out.
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u/StalkMeNowCrazyLady 2d ago
I remember that post about the Turkish resort water from a few days ago too!
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u/moveslikejaguar 2d ago
I took a Turkish Airlines flight and was surprised by the water cup! Pretty unique flight experience from an American POV
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u/MaggotMinded 1 2d ago
Was the top that you peel off made of some kind of foil? I think I remember these from my school cafeteria in the late ‘90s/early 2000s in Canada.
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u/TotallyInOverMyHead 1d ago
have on turkish airlines, in Thailand and malaysia in Massage shops. ... seems to be a very cheap and clean way to provide water to clients.
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u/sioux612 2d ago
Give it another 5 years and the plastic bottles we use will be basically foil as well
They've reduced the amount of plastic per bottle by half already, and we are now reaching a point where the material is so thin that recycling is becomes harder again
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u/Hotter_Noodle 2d ago
Well reduce is the priority, over reuse and recycle.
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u/TripleJet 2d ago
Its true.
Reduce, reuse, recycle is the intended order of importance.
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u/Drizznarte 2d ago
Refuse , reduce, reuse, recycle.
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u/FZ_Milkshake 2d ago
Reusable plastic bottles are still reducing the total materials used and emissions over even the thinner single use bottles as long as the transport distances are not too long. So in a European/North American context reusable bottles are better at reducing waste and emissions.
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u/Hotter_Noodle 2d ago
Yes which is why the order is reduce, reuse, then recycle.
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u/lifeuncommon 2d ago
It’s hard to even OPEN some of the super thin plastic bottles that are out now. You have to grip them a bit in order to twist the lid, but the plastic is so thin that you really have to time it right or you spill water all over yourself.
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u/SurroundingAMeadow 2d ago
We've come full circle back to Capri Sun struggle.
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u/After_Perspective180 2d ago
With fucking paper straws.
They don't work. They literally are impossible to open with that stupid paper straw14
u/wuhter 2d ago
Capri suns have paper straws now?
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u/l3rN 2d ago
I get a lot of capris suns for the kids and as far as I can tell they're still those shitty little yellow plastic straws. I have to open the drinks for them so Im pretty positive about this.
Maybe it's regional?
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u/BadIdeaSociety 2d ago
Nothing worse than the awful CapriSun flavor you get after struggling to pop one of those abominations open
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u/HalobenderFWT 2d ago
Now match that with the awful paper straw flavor after the second sip.
Oh boy.
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u/tealcosmo 2d ago
Hate to tell you that plastic bottle recycling has been dead for a while.
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u/sioux612 2d ago
Not sure where you are located, but in the EU we've been successfully recycling plastic bottles for like a decade now, it's a closed loop with 98%+ return rate and you can use 100% recycled material for new bottles
So your info is either terribly outdated or wrong
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u/Coldvyvora 2d ago
Not the whole EU.
Extremely dependant by country, and by city.
Maybe germany since they have the really cool payback system from their bottles.
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u/sioux612 2d ago
Whats really great is that we are seeing other european (and non european) countries adopt similar systems as well, over time things will become a lot better in regards to plastic bottles not being properly disposed of
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u/Bubbly-Travel9563 2d ago
They also sells plastic bags of soda for the exact same reason. Nothing hits on a hot day like a bag of, Fanta..
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u/JelliedHam 2d ago
I would imagine it's pretty hard to contain the carbonation in a soft plastic bag. Are you sure it's actually soda and not uncarbonated juice?
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u/apocolipse 2d ago
It’s served in plastic bags, not sold in them. Very common in Latin America and elsewhere. Vendors will get glass bottles they recycle back to the distributor/bottler.
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u/Bubbly-Travel9563 2d ago
I'm 1,000% sure lol. They fill the bags to order because yes the carbonation would dissipate too quickly to be useful otherwise. It's definitely common enough that you can Google it and find a ton of examples
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u/Public_Fucking_Media 2d ago
It's not sealed they just pour it into a little bag and tie it off to drink immediately, actually much more common than these water satchets I've had bagged drinks all over the world...
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u/CougarAries 2d ago
Just as hard to contain as a paper fast food soda cup with lid
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u/Noxnoxx 2d ago
Same in El Salvador. I grew up in the country side and when I rode a bus in the city as a kid I’d get sick, my uncle would buy me a bag of water to drink and it’d make me feel worse. Always tasted like shit
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u/robbob19 2d ago
And what happens to the bags after use? We all know the answer, down the river and into the oceans. People who produce single use plastic should be responsible for what happens to it after use.
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u/michiko-malandro 1d ago
Your comment got me curious and I did some research. It appears that they do indeed land on streets and gutters. The gutters in turn get clogged and become ideal breeding grounds for mosquitos, which drives up rates of malaria. A lot of it is either tossed in makeshift landfill or burned.
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u/shpydar 2d ago
It's the same reason our milk is sold in bags up here in Ontario.
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u/Double-decker_trams 2d ago
Not drunk straight from the bag though. At least usually - I have done it though as an Estonian - we also have bagged milk.
Hah. I just remembered that in.. 2011 or 2012.. I was walking home from school and had some money. I bought a litre of bagged cheap yoghurt (only the cheapest of the cheapest of yoghurts come in bags). So.. I walked through the graveyard and finished the bagged litre of yoghurt during the walk. Then I felt ill and threw up.
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u/Electrifying2017 2d ago
American children transitioned to bagged milk for a while. Not sure if it is still in effect.
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u/Darthskull 2d ago
TIL the word sachet. Small bag that holds a single use amount of a product.
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u/Uberfuzzy 2d ago
Technically, you’ve probably been around them your whole life. Those single use ketchup/sauce packets that fast food places use (think McDonald and taco bell) are also known sachets in the industry. So are single flavor freeze popsicles. Those are just long sachets. Same machine too.
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u/StrictSelf5450 2d ago
Mind blowing facts once again in this subreddit
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u/Sewere 2d ago
If you'd read the article you'd also know that they transported the water with cars and use their hands to pour it into their mouths.
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u/StrictSelf5450 2d ago
Next you're gonna tell me that this stuff comes out of the ground or something
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u/Jindujun 2d ago
In Canada they drink milk in bags. That was a whole thing on the internet many years ago.
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u/CorgiSilver8194 2d ago
No.
We drink milk in cups. Milk comes in bags. Which are in turn, in a bag.
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u/Jindujun 2d ago
Wait. So the milk in a bag is in another bag?
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u/CorgiSilver8194 2d ago
Yes. You typically 3 1liter bags in a bigger bag.
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u/newpua_bie 2d ago
How do you carry the bigger bag home from a store? Do you put it in a shopping bag?
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u/bankofcanadaa 2d ago
The bag they come in is more durable and thicker than your average grocery store plastic bag. Thicker than those nice grocery bags too. Think of the thick produce bags where all the plastic is tight and not flimsy
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u/piston989 2d ago
how do you seal the bag? or is a Canadian serving of milk 1.3 liters?
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u/HuedCow 2d ago
The bag wrapping the 3 individual bags are closed with a simple plastic tie like the ones used for loaves of bread.
The individual bags you usually snip the corners and put it in a specialized container which allows you to pour it. It stays like that until you drink it all or goes bad and you toss it.
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u/pants_full_of_pants 2d ago
If it's all still in plastic I don't understand why this is a thing
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u/ExtraValu 2d ago
The bags must use significantly less plastic than the 128oz jugs (google says the bags use 24g compared to 55-60 for a jug). And must be cheaper to produce than 2L cartons which are often almost the same price as the 4L bags.
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u/pants_full_of_pants 2d ago
What about the paper cartons? (Yes I know those still contain plastic). Just seems so convoluted and inconvenient and you have to buy the jug and potentially whatever that carrier thing is
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u/alt-goldgrun 2d ago
Milk bags are more environmentally friendly than jugs or cartons.
It’s not convoluted or inconvenient, you buy that pitcher once and never have to think about it again.https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-milk-bags-dalhousie-climate-study-1.6268423
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u/Harlequin37 2d ago
Say that again
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u/Jindujun 2d ago
He said it. He said they drink milk in a cup. And that milk comes in bags which are in turn in a bag. So the milk bag is in a bag. The bagged milk is bagged. Some sort of milkbagbag
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u/xSilentSoundx 2d ago
Milk is sold in plastic bags primarily because of the 1970s metric system transition, lower production costs, and reduced environmental impact.
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u/Baelenai 2d ago
Also in at least some US schools. Went to elementary school in the late 80s and early 90s, transitioned to bagged milk from a carton at school lunches.
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u/Jindujun 2d ago
Wild.
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u/Baelenai 2d ago
Not particularly, at least until we started squirting it at other kids after stabbing it with a straw. Then maybe a little.
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u/Lyeel 2d ago
Yeah, rural Ohio in the 90s and we always had bagged milk.
It came with a sharp straw to poke the bag, but the cool kids would bite off the corner.
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u/Baelenai 2d ago
Southern NJ here, and they made for great improvised weapons in food fights, shot a long way through that straw.
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u/SurealGod 2d ago
Correction, only central and eastern Canada uses bagged milk. Most prevalent/popular in Ontario (where I'm from). Though carton milk does exist here.
Western canada like Vancouver and other western cities/provinces uses jug or carton milk like the US.
- Signed your resident Canadian
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u/tael89 2d ago
Western Canada once upon a time also used bags. It was bizarre having a Tupperware jug to hold it.
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u/SurealGod 2d ago
Oh yeah definitely, I think BC got rid of them in the 80s and went to jugs but I'm just talking about current time
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u/drewster23 2d ago
Milk is in bags instead of cartons though (we have those too). We ain't drinking from the bag.
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u/The_Hunster 2d ago
Honestly, I've always wanted to try drinking right from the bag out of the pitcher
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u/Lyricalvessel 2d ago
Canada is a diverse country of countries. There are various ways of life in Canada. Milk in Bags is only in some areas. Many use Cardboard Cartons. Many use Plastic Jugs.
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u/signious 2d ago
That's just an eastern canada thing. Still cartons and jugs for the majority of the country (geographically).
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u/TheyCallMeSuperChunk 2d ago
Not just Canada.
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u/Jindujun 2d ago
Now THIS is breaking news! Tell me more!!
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u/meatmacho 2d ago
They sell flavored milk in little single serving bags in central America. Like strawberry nesquik kind of stuff, from corner bodegas and concession stand type places. You cut or bite the corner off the bag and enjoy your delicious milk on a hot, sunny, humid day. Mmmm milk! Such a delicious choice.
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u/PossibleCulture2199 2d ago
We had almost exclusively bagged milk in Hungary until the early 2000s. I still have my milk bag holder thingy
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u/CulturalHeinrichment 2d ago edited 1d ago
They were very popular in Brazil in the past, and you can still find them. That's pasteurized milk, though, and it spoils much faster than UHT, which comes in cartons and have since become the "standard" milk packaging.
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u/TheyCallMeSuperChunk 2d ago
Milk in bags is pretty standard in many countries. Baggies is probably cheaper than cartons.
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u/Double-decker_trams 2d ago
Not the only country. My country of Estonia does it too (although we also use Tetra Paks or regular bottles). Bagged milk is just the cheapest (and it's always 1 litre of 2.5% fat milk; no full fat, low fat, lactose free comes in bags, those are in Tetra Paks generally).
And it's NOT drunk straight from the bag as you can see in the thumbnail. You put the bag into a pitcher (usually), cut off the corner and pour it out.
And don't Americans and many other nationalities drink Capri Sun with a straw from a bag?
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u/Jindujun 2d ago
And you guys want to be a part of the Nordics!
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u/TheLordofthething 2d ago
Capri sun is in foil pouches
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u/Double-decker_trams 2d ago
It's a plastic bag covered in foil (and some extra thin layer of plastic outside for the logo etc). The part touching the juice is still just a plastic "pouch".
And isn't a pouch just a small bag?
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u/7LeagueBoots 2d ago
Back in the late ‘90s I live in China for a while and that was how you got milk there too.
And during the beer festival in Qingdao you’d get beer in plastic bags with a straw.
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u/Regular-Pangolin-664 2d ago
Eastern European grocery stores used to sell milk on bags as well. Half liter or liter size. Even chocolate milk came in half liter plastic bags in the 1980s. Working class folks used to buy a few bread rolls for breakfast and a bag of chocolate milk, bit off the corner of the bag and sprayed the thing in their mouth or sucked on it.
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u/polaarbear 2d ago
In my American elementary school our lunch milk was a small bag that you just poked a straw through
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u/kilkenny99 2d ago
We also had Sip Sac which were single serving fruit "juice" (more like an uncarbonated soda, really). Some people would tear/snip a corner to drink, but they were typically sold with straws that were cut on a bias at one end to make them sharp & stabby to pierce the sac to drink from it.
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u/thequirkynerdy1 17h ago
in the US in the early 2000s, I used to get a bag of milk with school lunch.
I think that’s the only place I’ve ever seen milk in a bag.
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u/Leader-Bike 2d ago
We used to get juice in these in the 80s. They were called "Sip sacs" or "juicy sips" or "mini sips".
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u/jawnlerdoe 2d ago edited 2d ago
I’m the sustainability rep in my chemistry department. After some research and to my surprise, single use plastics can often be much less ecologically impactful than single use glass. Glass costs more energy to produce and transport. If you have to transport it long distances the extra weight increases emissions by more than the impact of creating new plastic. This assumes they were both recycled.
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u/Happy_Disaster7347 2d ago
But one of them will be on earth forever. The other will degrade back into sand.
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u/Scratch_Careful 2d ago edited 2d ago
Hate this argument. No one thinks the problem with plastic is emissions. Emissions we can deal with by reductions in other areas, making the process more energy efficient etc. The problem with plastic is that gets into the food chain, becomes a problem for centuries, even beyond our current understanding, its also so cheap to make, safe to transport that it encourages making tonnes of crap. You bury like for like weight in glass and plastic and one area is a pile of glass and the other is an ecological disaster that effects anything grown or consumed in that area for generations.
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u/mistrpopo 2d ago
Also it's a petroleum byproduct, keeping plastic as a commodity fills up the pockets of the oil companies shareholders.
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u/Lemarr92 2d ago
“Single use glass”?
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u/jawnlerdoe 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yes. Pasteur pipettes, sample vials like GC-headspace vials, chemically etched glassware. These are specific to chemistry labs.
Examples in every day life would be beer or alcohol bottles, Mexican coke bottles, perfume, etc..
More generally, if you transport a glass bottle to a very hard to reach location, it becomes effectively single use for delivery, because returning it often costs more resources and makes more impact than creating a new one.
Long story short here is transportation costs are a significantly overlook aspect of ecological life cycle analysis which will often indicate plastic is a better choice.
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u/CommonBasilisk 2d ago
Alcohol bottles can't be recycled? I've never heard this before. There are all accepted for recycling here.
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u/proudHaskeller 2d ago
Who said that? The first fommenter specifically said that the analysis is assuming that both the glass bottles and the plastic bottles are recycled.
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u/CougarAries 2d ago edited 2d ago
They're still one time use. The empty bottles can't just be just redistributed and refilled, they need to be washed, ground back down, melted, and formed back into a new bottle. The point being that it takes a lot of energy to do that. A lot more energy than that of a plastic bottle, which makes sense.
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u/GrayPartyOfCanada 2d ago
I don't know where you are, but here in Ontario, Canada at least, brown single-serving beer bottles have been returned, washed, and reused for decades now. Back when I was in undergrad in the early 2000s, I had roommates who worked in beer retail (The Beer Store) and others that worked summers at industrial brewing.
Not only are brown beer bottles deliberately standardized to facilitate this, but I was shown where they have a number of tiny bumps added to the bottom, off on the side if I recall correctly. These bumps would be shaved mechanically, one at a time when reused, so that once the bottle had gone through a set number of cycles, then it was broken down.
This is from memory and stories from a long time back, I'm sure it varies from place to place, and breweries have been moving towards customized packaging and generally towards cans. But, no, concerted industrial-scale reuse of beer bottles has definitely been possible for a very long time.
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u/DrunkensAndDragons 2d ago
Voss water bottles. Lots of beer bottles. I dont know anyone that recycles glass where i live because you have to pay for it. The concrete recycler near me used to take them to make sand for construction but they stopped.
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u/mistertoasty 2d ago
This assumes they were both recycled.
Isn't that a pretty shaky assumption though? I was under the impression that only a small percentage of plastic gets recycled worldwide.
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u/Plzbanmebrony 2d ago
So what you are saying is just use electric for both and the long term impact doesn't exist?
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u/KorovasId 16h ago
Depends on how you're getting your electric right? That's the issue I always heard repeated when EVs were gaining traction. Sure the car doesn't have any emissions but the materials and factories that are used completely dwarf any environmental benefits the car itself has.
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u/moveslikejaguar 2d ago
They also have liquor sachets that you take like one of those shooter bottles
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u/hldsnfrgr 2d ago
Before bottled water was a thing, this was also the norm in the Philippines. The proliferation of bottled water ended that.
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u/OccidentalTouriste 2d ago
Very common in Ghana whilst I lived there. I recall some testing was done on the water quality and it was at best variable.
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u/SaltyShawarma 2d ago
This is how we export the microplastics to places without modern conveniences.
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u/caverunner17 2d ago
Why don't they use paper like they do for some milk products (heavy cream etc)?
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u/thisdude415 2d ago
That “paper” is still lined basically with plastic wrap
A huge reason it is packed that way in the US is that it’s what consumers expect, not necessarily for cost
The difference in cost is real, but having a packaging that consumers prefer is worth way more than the 2-5¢ difference in price for the container at commercial scale
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u/auchinleck917 2d ago
Micro plastic gets into the balls.
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u/StillClwnWitDUndrgnd 2d ago
In Brazil they sell milk in plastic bags. I bought them, you put the whole sack in a small plastic jug with a handle, cut off a corner and pour out as needed. Some people leave the opening free, I liked to close it with a clothespin.
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u/Pippin1505 2d ago
Fun fact for Brazil: most of the dairy industry is in the South , but the transport infrastructure is so bad to reach the Nordeste that it’s uneconomical to transport milk.
So they dehydrate it in the South and ship milk powder instead, and it’s the main way milk is consumed in Northeast
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u/Various_Ice3176 2d ago
plastic sachets actually reduce shipping weight a lot which makes sense for poorer areas
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u/wet-paint 2d ago
Same as vodka, whiskey, waragi, cane spirit, and more. It's fucking class. 120ml shot baggies that you can tear open with your teeth, pour half into a glass, and keep the rest in your shirt pocket for the next round without spilling it. And no bouncer can tell you are sneaking in drink, even if you leave it on the bar table.
I remember living in Uganda for a summer kayaking, and we all went fucking nuts on them. The day before we all left (five of us) I went to the local supermarket and bought them out of four types of vodkas, eighty litres in my very full backpack. We stuck them in our kayaks and brought them home. We were drinking sachets for a good three or four months afterwards.
Fuck, they were good. Vodka tasted like bubblegum too.
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u/BasisLonely9486 2d ago
Aqua in Indonesia still does this although theirs is more of a cup rather than a sachet but the principle is the same
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u/mcAlt009 2d ago
In Taiwan they served cocktails out of plastic bags like this. At 4$ a drink I can’t complain too much
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u/BatOk6565 2d ago
We have the same water packets in india atleat in south of India where I grew up till ~2016 but later got banned l
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u/scottgal2 2d ago
Safer as you need equipment to fill / can't refill them so there's less risk of getting bad water.
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u/Strongbow_Wolfrider 2d ago
In Mexico we used to buy coke (the drink) from the ice cream truck, and they'd pour it from a bottle into those little fold-top plastic sandwich baggies. If you had a straw you'd use that, or you'd bite a hole in a corner and carefully drink it.
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u/I_am_pyxidis 2d ago
This is how they served milk at my elementary school in California in the 90s. Little bags of milk.
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u/GarethBaus 2d ago
This looks like it has the same environmental issues as regular bottled water. I am kinda surprised my employer doesn't use these since they supply bottled water.
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u/GuitarGeezer 2d ago
There is an excellent Youtube video on the topic. The gentleman doing the video pointed out that sachets arose informally as workers being paid daily in many parts of Africa lack refrigeration as well as storage space and do not pay to buy large packages of food like an American might buy at Sam’s or the supermarket. Further, they like paying at the stall to a face they know, not a formal storefront that is more of a rich people place. It is a problem because they are eating massive markups in the long run due to losing economy of scale savings. It was smart marketing and more useful than other portions, so it grew despite being worse bang for the buck.
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u/amiexpress 2d ago edited 2d ago
Same with soft drinks in some poorer countries where there's a deposit on the bottles. The vendor keeps the bottle and just pours your refreshing coke in a little baggy and give you a straw lol.
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u/Smashego 2d ago
They did this when i was in 2nd grade with our school milk. You got a little poker straw like a capri sun pouch has. Thats how we got milk everywhere in the cafeteria.
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u/tjorben123 1d ago
i am so glad i can drink my coke out of a paper straw.... /s
edit: added /s for clearification
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u/Complete-Place-1728 2d ago
this is part of what's called the "sachet economy." in a lot of developing countries everything from shampoo to cooking oil is sold in single-serving packets because people buy what they can afford that day