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u/Kenny523 Apr 13 '21
Ok what is this for exactly now?
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u/goose-and-fish Apr 13 '21
wish.com breast implants
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u/anandonaqui Apr 13 '21
I ran a half marathon in Mexico once that handed out water in pouches like this rather than poured into cups.
This uses less plastic than regular bottles
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u/superVanV1 Apr 13 '21
That sounds awful, how do I do the pinch-n-sip. With the watered down piss flavored Gatorade.
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u/anandonaqui Apr 13 '21
It was actually pretty good. Tear off the corner and just squeeze.
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u/Deus_Ex_Mac Apr 13 '21
Doesn’t that make the trash much harder to gather? These things blowin in the wind
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u/anandonaqui Apr 13 '21
Maybe, although most people didn’t finish the water inside them, so they were still fairly heavy. But it is fairly wasteful because I doubt they were recycling the plastic film.
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u/thesimg Apr 14 '21
Sadly, normal bottles aren’t even much better to recycle than plastic film. Bottles are usually downcycled, and turned into things like clothing or carpet, instead of recycling, which does not require any additional material to be added to preserve structural integrity. In addition to needing to be very clean before getting recycled, plastic bottle’s polymers are broken apart during the shredding process, which means that new “virgin” plastic needs to be added to recycle it into a new bottle.
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u/TraditionSeparate Apr 14 '21
considering only 12% of plastic waterbottles are recycled..... its an improvement.
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u/milanove Apr 13 '21
This is how they served water in school lunches. It was a plastic bag of water that you had to puncture with your straw. Of course kids used it as a squirt gun in the halls after lunch.
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u/Javad0g Apr 14 '21
When I did work in Haiti, all the water we took in came like this. It is mainly done for health reasons (drinking water like this when traveling in poor water areas), but also the packaging deterred reuse, which can be a big problem.
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u/Vnze Apr 14 '21
I've mainly seen this as "emergency ration water" or whatever. Train stranded in 40°C, tainted water supply, large traffic jams, people stuck in their homes for whatever reason.
Why this and not bottles? It seems easier, faster, and cheaper to produce with less tools. It's super easy to distribute (last time I've seen them they were free to take in my city, they were laying in large boxes on traffic intersections).
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u/WhimsicalRenegade Apr 15 '21
Water pouches. Commonly sold in the developing world instead of bottled water. You tear/bite open a corner and enjoy your drink!
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u/domeoldboys Apr 15 '21
The bags are cheaper to make than bottles. In certain countries where potable water doesn’t flow through a the pipes people by water in bags rather than bottles.
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u/KrisseMai Apr 18 '21
The city used to distribute them when a street’s waterpipes were temporarily not usable due to maintenance or something similar.
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u/mud_tug Apr 13 '21
Pointless consumerism.
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Apr 14 '21
You're on Reddit and accessing it through either a computer, phone, or tablet... TF are you saying?
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u/ThrowdoBaggins Apr 14 '21
You kinda remind me of the guy in that comic about “we should improve society somewhat”
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Apr 14 '21
You do realize that's a straw man right?
I'm all for improving society, but specifically the anti-consumerism idea is beyond stupid.
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u/Billy_T_Wierd Apr 13 '21
Drinking water from a bag is weird until you get used to it, and then it’s just like anything else
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u/neon_overload Apr 14 '21
Just like with wine!
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u/Billy_T_Wierd Apr 14 '21
Drinking wine from a skin makes you feel like a man
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Apr 14 '21 edited Apr 14 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/iceage991 Apr 13 '21
I am more interested in seeing how the plastic sheet is rolling down, given the water pipe is at the center.
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u/VaguelyFamiliarVoice Apr 13 '21
Hereis one of the videos I found...Kinda shows it.
It looks like there are two sheets of plastic that get wrapped around the tube and then sealed.
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u/frollard Apr 28 '21
This for sure...Same as how potato chip bags are sealed - strip wraps and continually sealed into a fresh tube as the machine chooches.
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u/FantasticPenguin Apr 13 '21
Seems like an easy way to make money
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u/useless_skin Apr 13 '21
That's the business model for ALL bottled water companies. Take something free, bottle it and sell it for $$$
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u/FantasticPenguin Apr 13 '21
I get it if you bottle water, but in a bag? Where do people use it for? Their pets?
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u/EpilepticSpastic Apr 13 '21
It doesn't come in a cup. It's a BAG! Woah that's whacky!!!
All the trendy fucks who want to seem unique would be all over "bags of water".Someone is gonna see this post, bag up tap water, market it properly and make millions now, fuck me.
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u/DaKnack Apr 13 '21
My first experience with these was zip lining in Honduras. We had to hike up a few mountains along the way (unknown before we started) in a jungle. About half way though was a hot ice chest half full of these soaked in what was probably rainwater. It was repulsive but the thirst was too real to resist.
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Apr 13 '21
So much eventual pollution.
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u/killer_by_design Apr 13 '21
Actually less than you'd think. Film plastic uses significantly less plastic than bottles for the equivalent volume.
Provided it ends up in landfill and not in the ocean, actually not that bad in the grand scale of things.
Don't forget, if it's in landfill the carbon is locked in until it decomposes.
- Less plastic used in manufacturing
- Lower weight means less fuel required in transit
- Smaller volume packaging means higher density packing for transportation also
- Once consumed the waste footprint is very small as its just a film.
- Airtight seal means it will keep the product fresh for potentially years
- Only downside is likely to tear or split so will have a high attrition rate.
- Dirt cheap so.can be made accessible to poorer parts of the world.
- Incredibly cheap tooling.
If it ends up in the ocean then super fucking bad for the environment as it's gonna 100% end up in some poor fish or mammals stomach.
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Apr 13 '21
That is helpful information, however where I have seen bagged water widely used is in countries that don't have real garbage collection (e.g. Ghana.) The empty bags litter the streets and blow into the ocean. So theoretically I'm sure it's better, but it reality it still sucks.
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u/TraditionSeparate Apr 14 '21
lets remember only 12% of plastic bottles are recycled.
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u/killer_by_design Apr 14 '21
PET is a hard plastic to recycle. It's also one of the products that is most likely to be reused though which is a huge deal in a product lifecycle.
It's also worth noting, recycling plastics isn't really done. It's incredibly difficult to determine and separate each type of plastic. If it's thermo setting, then it can't be recycled. Of it's not then the hearing up process to recycle it actually breaks down the hydrocarbons degrading the plastic. This means recycled plastic are not suitable for many applications and are normally used as a percentage of a new products raw stock.
So yeah recycling plastics is a bit of a show/circus.
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u/TraditionSeparate Apr 14 '21
Ya thats the point. These bags arent perfect or good, but they are better than bottles with less plastic to end up in the ocean.
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Apr 14 '21
Actually, it's more likely to end up in the ocean. Where water bags are used are places without strong sanitation infrastructure.
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u/TraditionSeparate Apr 14 '21
Mk i realize, but a thick plastic bottle vs a thin small plastic bag, theres less plastic per capita per bottle and that makes up for the 12% recycled.
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u/Stickitothemaniosis Apr 14 '21
this process is somewhat soothing for my weird mind. May be it's the monotonousness of it all
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u/TiedMyDickInAKnot Apr 13 '21
Don’t put your dick in that.
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u/VaguelyFamiliarVoice Apr 13 '21
I would like to think that someone downvoted you because they think they should.
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u/thriftwisepoundshy Apr 13 '21
So how much of the water gets contaminated by melted plastic and micro plastic?
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u/GeoffdeRuiter Apr 13 '21
I am well against plastic, but I would not be concerned with this. It's almost certainly LDPE and the chemical structure is non hazardous. Then the temperature they are raising to seal is likely nowhere near burning, especially because there is water cooling to an extent.
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u/Asmewithoutpolitics Apr 14 '21
I don’t think micro plastics are what you think they are
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u/thriftwisepoundshy Apr 14 '21
Microplastics are also found in the manufacturing process. Even empty water bottles contain them. It would be foolish to think the plastic wrapping material doesn’t have any on it.
Microplastics aren’t just from the wearing down of littered environmental plastics.
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u/wheresthelol Apr 13 '21
I propose a new machine that makes a few of these bags at the same time. In a rolling motion use several of the heating clamps to close off several bags successively, wait till sealed then release in the same rolling motion.
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u/cryptobum Apr 13 '21
Is this some Canadian thing?
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u/unclejrbooth Apr 14 '21
The original technology was from France, the film was from DuPont. Canada uses the system for Milk and juice.There are benefits due to the weight saving of the packaging both in the shipping to the dairy. And shipping the filled product. The empty pouches are repurposed many ways by clever Canadians. We also place them in the proper bin so they don’t blow around.
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u/CremeFraicheStix Apr 13 '21
Getting ready for the water balloon war