Plastic Drinking Glasses

We still have some glass drinking glasses in our house, but I hardly ever use them. Given a choice I will almost always use a plastic drinking glass, mostly because they are lighter. Also, you don't have to worry about them breaking if you drop one. You still have to clean up the spilled liquid, but you don't have to worry about picking up all the little shards of broken glass. A Correll cereal bowl broke in our house the other day. Correll ware is a practically unbreakable ceramic, but occasionally they do break, and when they do they shatter much like glass. I swept up the broken pieces, and then wiped up the area with a damp paper towel. Lastly I used my foot to sweep the floor to see if I could detect any little fragments. I heard a scraping noise, and when I checked the bottom of my foot I found a minute spec of broken ceramic. I did not feel it with my foot, but I was able to hear it being dragged across the vinyl floor. At this point I said good enough and left it.

Later on I come into the kitchen and there are series of red blotches on the floor. Looks like blood. Somebody found another piece of broken cereal bowl, but who? Gus, the cat, that's who. He had left little bloody paw prints across the kitchen and half way across the family room carpet. Bad kitty! It wasn't a bad cut. We checked to see if the shard was still stuck in his foot. It wasn't, so we banned him to the garage until he decided to quit bleeding.

But back to the plastics. They do have a couple of problems. We had some crystal clear plastic glasses that looked very nice for a couple of months, but then they started developing cracks. The cracks did not leak, but they proliferated and sort of detracted from their appearance. Now we have some softer, cloudier plastics and they have not changed their appearance at all.

The other problem has to do with dishwashers. Most glass glasses have a flat bottom. Most plastic glasses have a rim around the bottom edge. When they are washed in the dishwasher, the glass glasses drain dry, but the rim on the bottom of the plastic glasses holds a little pool of water. This means either: A) extra fooling around to get them dry, or B) putting them away wet, neither of which is really a satisfactory option.

I think the plastic glasses have this rim so they will not slide when you set them on the table. They are so light that even a small amount of water will enable them to slide. Glass glasses are heavy enough to penetrate a film of water. The rim on the plastic glasses enables them to penetrate the film of liquid to make contact with the table and not go sliding into your lap.