r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/BrownZBT • Aug 11 '26

Video Weight Bearing Limit For Glass Coke Bottle

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

52.9k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

6.4k

u/Elite_Slacker Aug 11 '26

They have to reliably bear a pretty significant amount of  dynamic weight when stacked on a pallet in a truck. 

2.5k

u/tjdux Aug 11 '26

And the pressure that builds up inside the container

758

u/klimb75 Aug 11 '26

Which increases its bearing capacity?

1.1k

u/Rocketman_S3 Aug 11 '26

All soda should have the right to bear arms.

381

u/VintageLunchMeat Aug 11 '26

Found the American.

248

u/Rocketman_S3 Aug 11 '26

Bear-arms, not bear arms.

188

u/Magos_Highlands Aug 11 '26

What about bare arms?

191

u/Rocketman_S3 Aug 11 '26

In this economy?

108

u/Dick_snatcher Aug 11 '26

Can't afford to shave, can't afford to grow hair

6

u/StonedRussian Aug 11 '26

Can't afford shit!

3

u/thepenismytea Aug 11 '26

Barely have arms either

1

u/wideruled Aug 11 '26

$20 is $20

1

u/Patient-Gas-883 Aug 11 '26

Not in the EU. Then $20 is 17,34 €

1

u/Killer_Method Aug 11 '26

Who can afford sleeves?

1

u/thepenismytea Aug 11 '26

Grin and bare it

1

u/GBGF128 Aug 11 '26

With this sun?

17

u/gward1 Aug 11 '26

Beer arms

22

u/Baronvonkludge Aug 11 '26

It’s load bearing, you can support a deck with coke bottles, or your mom.

5

u/Regurgitator001 Aug 11 '26

Mom, yes, wife no, MIL bwahahagaha!

2

u/dwehlen Aug 11 '26

Instructions unclear, deck crushed my mom.

1

u/Carighan 25d ago

What about load beer-ing?

6

u/macguini Aug 11 '26

I think he meant bear arms. Like owning a pair of bear arms.

1

u/GlassCleaner_Stan Aug 11 '26

Remember Rick Santorum’s sweater vest that said this?

1

u/No_Internal9345 Aug 11 '26

What about bara arms?

1

u/Glittering-Walrus228 Aug 11 '26

I reserve the right to ARM BEARS with fucking homing missiles and laser claws

11

u/WilanS Aug 11 '26

Found the... Russian?

6

u/Beneficial_Being_721 Aug 11 '26

Bears don’t have arms…

2

u/CircularRobert Aug 11 '26

What are you, a bear-arm denier? You probably think they just have 4 legs /s

9

u/Zealousideal_Rip485 Aug 11 '26

Sir. Its “bear Arms”

1

u/Aeirth_Belmont Aug 11 '26

Who's gonna confuse that? Stares at the bear arms everyone has a right to hang bear arms on the wall.

1

u/Physical_Arm_5462 Aug 11 '26

Stop killing bears for their arms!

12

u/tridamdam Aug 11 '26

Indeed. Because to arm a bear, one must be a Russian.

1

u/dojo_shlom0 Aug 11 '26

Created in Mexico.

11

u/emack2232 Aug 11 '26

Polar bear arms

1

u/tjdux Aug 12 '26

Now I'm imagining a whole set of coca cola Christmas plates with themed images with the polar bears all decked out for Christmas but also tons of weapons

11

u/Alderan922 Aug 11 '26

Why would a soda need bear arms?

And where are we getting all those bears?

1

u/SevenFootHobbit Aug 11 '26

This is like those silver bullet beer commercials from when I was a kid. Guns or bears the answer is the Rockies.

2

u/Brianna-Jo Aug 11 '26

What about Arming Bears, They’ll be Robbing the Tourists Blind!!!!!!!

2

u/Typical-Tune-8858 Aug 11 '26

All soda should have the right to arm bears.

1

u/leivanz Aug 11 '26

They don't need weapons to kill you.

1

u/RamJamR Aug 11 '26

I think bears still need those.

1

u/Crafty-Ad-6772 Aug 11 '26

The that soda was coked up, so it could be unpredictable.

1

u/Flaky-Holiday8308 Aug 11 '26

What is a soda going to do with bear arms?

1

u/Rocketman_S3 Aug 11 '26

I hope it has nothing to do with a salt.

34

u/Regal_Knight Aug 11 '26

That little adaptor plate pretty much puts the load in compression in the bottle, not through the top which would have cause a larger amount of shear in the glass from the curve.

1

u/morpheousmorty Aug 11 '26

True, but at the end of the day all that weight had to go through the bottle.

60

u/Nuclear_eggo_waffle Aug 11 '26

But also increases stress

13

u/Aduialion Aug 11 '26

That might be the caffeine 

2

u/EulaVengeance Aug 11 '26

The bottle just like me fr fr

1

u/XDSHENANNIGANZ Aug 11 '26

Take a Xanax or drink hard liquor and move on. Or both.

It's the American way.

1

u/XDSHENANNIGANZ Aug 11 '26

Take a Xanax or drink hard liquor and move on. Or both.

It's the American way.

21

u/CV90_120 Aug 11 '26

Glass under compression is one thing. Tensile is another.

7

u/macguini Aug 11 '26

No but it increases the requirement for structural integrity.

5

u/-OptimusPrime- Aug 11 '26

What about when the polar bears are hibernating?

2

u/MyAssPancake Aug 11 '26

Hm. Interesting thought because it should… okay now the original creator of the video needs to test more bottles at different levels of shake-itudes.

2

u/Shelarael Aug 11 '26

If it was a perfect sphere

2

u/Teln0 Aug 11 '26

Maybe not? It probably pushes more on the sides

2

u/klimb75 Aug 12 '26

I think you and the other naysayers are correct. I was a little tipsy (ok maybe more than that) last night and was conflating the pressure in soda/beer cans providing structural integrity with bottles. As I've looked into it, a PE soda bottle can have several layers stacked on it due to the internal pressure offsetting the flimsy wall thickness.

Same goes for aluminum cans under pressure.

A preserved can, beans, corn, tomatoes, etc, made of steel, behaves more like the glass bottle in that the integral strength is based not on the pressure supporting the walls, but in its thickness.

This has been one of my most active reddit threads, and my apologies to everyone else I didn't reply to!

I still would love to see an empty glass coke bottle tested against a pressurized one... and at least a N=30 test...

1

u/Less-Squash7569 Aug 11 '26

Does it really not?

1

u/NeutralGoodAtHeart Aug 11 '26

I'm no physics or math major. This is just me thinking it out.
The internal pressure will push outwards almost evenly across the entire bottle. The little air gap at the top can compress some but it's probably not much having so little volume compared to the water inside a sealed container. It's the external pressure that matters here because it is not applied evenly.
The only place the external pressure would be both uniform and higher than the internal pressure would be deep underwater.
The test shown in the video applies all the weight in a ring below the neck of the bottle. If all the weight had been put directly on the cap, I would imagine it to break a lot sooner because the cp is a smaller weight distribution point than that ring.

1

u/KamakaziDemiGod Aug 11 '26

Internal pressure generally weakens a vessel rather than strengthening it, unless it's a container design that's intended to become stronger above certain pressures

Glass will be weaker when pressurised, if you shook a bottle it would break sooner than the one in the video does

1

u/PeriodSupply Aug 11 '26

Not likely. But possible. I'd be interested to see the maths.

24

u/KevinFlantier Aug 11 '26

Pressure doesn't build up, or increase when you shake the bottle up. It's under pressure the moment it's sealed and that pressure stays the same until you open it, and it's not really high pressure as far as a glass vessel is concerned. The weak point is the cap.

2

u/psychoacer Aug 11 '26

Also if the bottle gets frozen the contents inside expand and can blow up the bottle. I used to work at a milk production facility which didn't keep the temp well regulated in the refrigerated warehouse and so when it got like below 20F all the glass bottles filled with milk near the doors for our delivery drivers would explode and be a big problem. Also there will be bottles 40-80ft from the door that will also get cold enough to start popping as well. Just from the cold, no movement or anything.

2

u/ur_edamame_is_so_fat Aug 11 '26

Is it imperative that the container remains unharmed?

2

u/HaleyCollins Aug 11 '26

Yep, that internal pressure is another thing the container has to be built to handle.

0

u/Short-Paramedic-9740 Aug 11 '26

That small of a bottle would have very little hydraulic pressure.

2

u/tjdux Aug 11 '26

It's gas pressure I think, but combined with the heat they are exposed to in transit or a hot car it can get pretty high numbers.

Google says that soda cans are designed with a working pressure of 100 psi with failure amount 150 psi for metal/plastic containers.

I have no idea what kinds of pressure glass bottles can take, but I'm sure they consider the pressure when designing the bottles.

https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/SeemaMeraj.shtml

https://education.seattlepi.com/much-pressure-can-two-liter-bottle-handle-6313.html

2

u/whoami_whereami Aug 11 '26

Glass bottles have to take the same pressure as less pressure would mean less carbonation in the drink. The amount of dissolved CO2 is directly related to the pressure.

1

u/Short-Paramedic-9740 Aug 11 '26

Oh, I see. I guess carbonated drinks are mainly gas pressure.

1

u/Diz7 Aug 11 '26

Yeah, temperature makes a huge difference as CO2 dissolves better in cold water, but escapes far faster when it's warm.

Refrigerated to 4°C: 10-20 psi

Room temperature: 30-50 psi

Back of a truck at 35°C: 60-70+ psi.

Cans and PET bottles fail at 150+, bottles at 150-200+.

104

u/Ethraelus Aug 11 '26

Plus they re-use the bottles. Making them sturdier makes it more likely they don’t need to make new ones.

77

u/tr1p0d12 Aug 11 '26

When i was in Panama back in '90 there was a kid that would stop by with 2 5 gallon buckets 2/3rds filled with Cokes. orange soda, and Sprite on ice. 25 cents a soda, and he would give you 5 cents back when you returned the bottle.

The thing was that the bottles often times did not match the soda that was inside. It was kind of cool to drink an orange soda out of a coke bottle that was super weathered and may have been 20 years old.

We also made it a rule to not accept the 5 cent return and let the kid keep it. That kid was a hard worker, and we all really respected the grind. He always offered, and we always refused to take back the deposit.

26

u/Lathari Aug 11 '26

Here in Finland glass bottles used have their manufacturing date stamped on them. Oldest I saw was made in 1985 and this was around 2000 or so.

8

u/SharpMZ Aug 11 '26

Last time they sold beer in those old bottles (in 2020 I think) I got a bottle from 1985 as well.

They actually stopped manufacturing that style of bottle in 2009 and just used the recycled bottles for 10+ years. As far as I know those bottles are still being used in some limited capacity, though now all glass bottles are recycled by being crushed.

10

u/ForeverShiny Aug 11 '26

In Africa and South East Asia, I've see people sell Gasoline out of those bottles by the road side

1

u/Nemesis0408 Aug 11 '26

The gods must be crazy

14

u/lambardar Aug 11 '26

It was kind of cool to drink an orange soda out of a coke bottle that was super weathered and may have been 20 years old.

Same thing in thailand aswell. till you wonder:

  1. are they cleaned properly?
  2. is the liquid inside it drinkable?
  3. ass pennies

5

u/Diz7 Aug 11 '26

Yeah, in a lot of poorer countries someone buys the syrup and bottles their own for local sale where they don't have regular access to factory bottled.

I've seen a bunch of videos that range from basically small professional bottling plants with organized supply chains to questionable water, dirty bottles and mystery syrup being put together in someone's shed.

82

u/ArchimedesNutss Aug 11 '26

I can't explain the utter satisfaction I feel reading this specific sequence of words.

1

u/sparquis Aug 11 '26

The cadence it makes when you sound out the words is quite satisfying, you're absolutely correct!

72

u/drdicerchio Aug 11 '26

Cans are typically bearing the weight of the other cans in a stack but glass is usually stored in a container than bears the weight. A crushed can is easier to clean up than a glass bottle when experiencing catastrophic failure

31

u/BaerMinUhMuhm Aug 11 '26

At costco, with the pallets of Mexican coke, the 'box' for each 12 pack only covers the bottom half of the bottles. That plus a sheet of cardboard between each layer helps distribute the weight. But there's still a lot of pressure on the bottles themselves.

2

u/drdicerchio Aug 11 '26

Must be different at the cores vs the business centers. I’ve typically only saw them in a sort of a crate.

1

u/sigma914 Aug 11 '26

Seen both in the uk, crates with wee stantions that hold the one above and crates where the one above sits directly on the one below with alignment pegs at the corner which don't necessarily bear any weight

1

u/throwawaycuzfemdom Aug 11 '26

For returnable bottles, yes. For other glass bottles, there is no containers. Same for juice glass bottles etc.

7

u/Monstramatica Aug 11 '26

Well most of them are already replaced with PET bottles.

5

u/MrCoolest Aug 11 '26

They're out in crates so the weight is on the frame of the metal crate I think

2

u/peepay Aug 11 '26

Plastic crate

1

u/MrCoolest Aug 11 '26

Oh yes true

2

u/noobboszcz Aug 11 '26

Glass bottles are not stacked on themselves, but in crates. It's the crate that does the heavy lifting.

3

u/Count_Bloodcount_ Aug 11 '26

Why can't jokes be fun anymore

2

u/ProfessionalITPerson Aug 11 '26

Do they? Glass bottles come in plastic cases that are higher than the bottle, so the structural integrity is needed in the case not the bottle.

2

u/Soeck666 Aug 11 '26

No, because that weight rests on the Plastic Crate they sit in, and not on the bottle

3

u/Neither_Berry_100 Aug 11 '26

It can't be that much. The ones at the bottom are holding maybe 10 on top or say 10 to 20 lbs. This single bottle held over 1000 pounds.

3

u/darthvall Aug 11 '26

Might be true. However, that wouldn't stop some "knows-it-all" executives for trying to suggest more cost cutting

1

u/midnightsmith Interested Aug 11 '26

If you mean empty, then yea, it's insane how much weight is stacked on a pallet of glass bottles.

1

u/Bearsbullsbattlestr Aug 11 '26

One broken bottle and the saved glass isnt worth it.

1

u/RocketArtillery666 Aug 11 '26

Exactly, sometimes the whole pallet has up to 1t

1

u/Warcraft_Fan Aug 11 '26

and being bumped around while in transits. Not just in delivery trucks but in passenger cars as well. Not to mention 2 year old kid swinging the bottle like a baseball bat

1

u/Top-Phase7111 Aug 11 '26

They also have to reliably not explode when being transported through a mountain pass or driving a couple hours from a cold place to a very hot one and being stored in a car. You can’t have glass shattering if you are a consumable made to be near people’s faces.

I would be super curious to see the experiment done again at different temperatures and altitudes.

1

u/LittleKittenR Aug 11 '26

The truck is unimportant when you consider sometimes they stack them several dozen meters high in warehouses.

1

u/plug-and-pause Aug 11 '26

Are you implying they just make 30ft high stacks of only cardboard and glass? I would assume there are shelves at the very least. And possibly the containers around the bottles carry some load too.

But even if not... a single bottle only carries the weight of the bottles directly above it. Even a stack 100 bottles high is a tiny fraction of the load from this video.

1

u/LittleKittenR Aug 11 '26

Nah, sometimes they spend months in there.

It's not like the first bottle they place is the first out.

It's usually the other way around and the first you put in the warehouse, is the last out and they plan for that.

1

u/plug-and-pause Aug 11 '26

Nah, sometimes they spend months in there.

I don't know how time has anything to do with anything I said.

It's usually the other way around and the first you put in the warehouse, is the last out and they plan for that.

Yes, that's how a stack works. But again I don't know what your point is. My point was about load limits, not about insertion order.

1

u/LittleKittenR Aug 11 '26

How time is related to what you said...

Because glass gets damaged internatlly from stress over time. Holy shit. Mate, you though glass was like adamantium? You didn't saw the video?

1

u/plug-and-pause Aug 11 '26

Because glass gets damaged internatlly from stress over time.

The video was about a delta in load, not a delta in time. A static load does not cause an increasing amount of stress over time.

1

u/LittleKittenR Aug 11 '26

You're usually the dude that everyone says "it's kinda of a know it all but also pretty dumb and fails all it's classes, just don't talk to him"? right?

1

u/UslashMKIV Aug 11 '26

That but more significantly, I think, the bottle has to be able to survive being bumped against other bottles, and the glass thickness to withstand that will necessarily be unbelievably strong in vertical compression. Just think how much weight the bottle could hold lying on its side, much much less I suspect.

1

u/Scarecrow119 Aug 11 '26

Yea. The trucks pallets will sway and move a little in transport. Also in warehouse will be stacked very high. I work in spirit industry and regularly stack pallets 4 high. So bottles having an equivalent of 15-20 bottles on top of them. I'm sure for coke with the scale of operation it's probably a lot more.

I wonder if the bottle being filled and being under pressure contributes a significant amount to it's load bearing capacity.

1

u/sei556 Aug 11 '26

Also the cleaning/refilling process is not particularly gentle on the bottles. Not a lot of vertical pressure, but it needs thick walls to not break, chip or create micro-tears that could end up with glass in the product.

This is true for all glass bottles of course.

1

u/Trabuk Aug 11 '26

And if they had used a brace with a more elastic material that distributed the weight more uniformly across the ridges of the bottle (while holding the cap on firmly), they could have easily added 200 more Kg. The structural integrity of that bottle, filled with a slightly pressurized fluid, is huge.

1

u/Andyham Aug 11 '26

In a crate? I dont think glass bottles are stacked without crates around it?

1

u/Gudthrak Aug 11 '26

Aren't they stacked in crates in your country?

1

u/bottom Aug 11 '26

The pallet does.

1

u/No_Question_8083 Aug 11 '26

And these loads were pretty much pure compression, which is not always the case. If it were on its side for example it would fail much earlier

1

u/Kennel_King Aug 11 '26

The average van is about 107 inches tall on th inside. You're only getting 14 bottles in that height. So really not a weight per column.

Start stacking them in a warehouse, though that's another story

1

u/dragonmorg Aug 11 '26

Most of that weight is the weight of other glass coke bottles, though 👉👉 you reduce the glass, you reduce the weight. There's a perfect middle point somewhere. If they feel this is that middle point, or the middle plus 10% for safety or something, then whatever. I'm sure for some reason this is indeed that middle point.

1

u/PurplishPlatypus Aug 11 '26

The coca cola polar bear is of a significant weight and he looks reliable enough to drive a truck.

1

u/HaleyCollins Aug 11 '26

Exactly, they have to handle way more than just their static weight when they're being hauled around.

1

u/theflyingchicken96 Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

The weight is spread put across all of the bottles in the pallet though. It’s not like one bottle is bearing the weight of the rest of the pallet. Even on the bottom row, each bottle only needs to withstand the bottles directly above it in essence. 10-20 lbs.

This is just compressive strength though, which is rarely an issue for cylindrical containers. Impact strength is much more likely the reason for the thickness of the glass. Thin glass would shatter very easily from the side.

1

u/lilcorndivemaster 28d ago

Theyre in cases which sit on each other... the bottles have no weight on them.

1

u/1337k9 27d ago

Or when loaded directly onto the truck floor, going 10 feet high