Has any thought been put into the banishment of plastics that are tossed as packaging and a return to the refillable container system?
Imagine a consumer returning to a grocer with a multitude of well made glass containers, and either exchanging them for already full containers or refilling these containers themselves.
Shelf life of a product might force an exchange method, but waste could be eliminated on a massive scale.
My ignorance comes into play in not knowing if glass ever releases any of the toxins into its contents that some plastics can on continual use.
Further, I can see some simple solutions to what in the past has been noted as issues with this system. One such issue of note is the depletion of nutrients from milk when it is exposed to light, simply placing this milk into dark glass containers would solve that, or otherwise directly into shopping bags.
My hopes are that this idea does not come across as totally ignorant or willfully stupid.
Good ideas have a way of being recycled Quane and therein lies the answer to your question. The root cause of our dilemma is that humanity is beginning to drown in it’s own post consumer waste, for a variety of reasons.
Our generation has to redefine the definition of what is waste / garbage and thereby alter behaviors. Humanity can no longer afford the luxury of disposable consumer goods. The solution must include closed loop life cycles since we need to learn to work with what we have available as basic production materials.
There are a number of packaging materials available, glass as you mentioned is one that has always signaled premium to the consumer. Just as there are barriers that can protect a product from denaturing elements as you mentioned.
The inhibitor to deployment are profit margins. Very few organizations take the long view but rather seek obscene ROI’s (return on investments). Until the realization that our manufacturing base needs to change is accepted it’s going to be a tough battle to motivate industry to initially accept lower profit margins.
The Body Shop jumps to mind as an early advocate of 2-way packaging. Scandinavia and Europe have been champions of recycling. The next step is to close the loop and learn to work with the abundance of post consumer waste at hand.
Dean, great reply sir.
Would it be feasible for these companies to come to think of non-return of the packaging (which would entail a markup) as a portion of their beloved bottom line?
So many manufacturers seem to love coupons (yay wasting even more paper in a paperless capable society) that it seems a system that provides a customer with an in-store ident-card, could easily replace printed coupons. This leads into the idea that the coupons discount would be applied to the card upon return, and taken off the top at check out.
If there is no return of the reusable containers, there is no discount. If the containers were damaged or returned uncleaned the discount could also not apply or simply be less than the most possible.
Perhaps this concept is something of a pipe dream, but I know I'd much rather carry a crate of reusable containers with me to the grocer on each trip than carry that same crate out to be dumped as waste.
Perhaps we will see some stores such as World Market or Trader Joe's move towards a closed system of reusing containers.
Displaying my ignorance again, but I cannot see how creating new packaging for all of these products would be cheaper than cleaning reusable packaging. But that doesn't take into account the creating of those reusable packaging materials that are destroyed (as opposed to the cost of cleaning returns).
Of course, I've always thought there should be a tax levied against the companies producing waste packaging for a product, just to get them to lower the amount of superfluous packaging that exists in many material products, just for marketing sake.
Quane your suggestions are valid. Case in point; I lived in Sweden for a number of years and there the recycling culture took root in our family. When you explained your idea of coupons for returnable’s that’s exactly the way the system works in Sweden. When you return a PET or aluminum can to the grocery store there are compacting stations that resemble vending machines dedicated to the two materials located adjacent to the checkout counters.
The children love it. Feed the clean PET beverage bottles into the slot, wait for the crushing sound to stop repeat until you have exhausted your supply then request a ticket which you then present to the cashier for cash. In effect the recycling premium is paid out once the bottle is returned.
There are many best practices on recycling deployed in neighboring & distant countries that can be readily adopted or modified to suit. In North America we have a tendency to want to reinvent the wheel, which slows down the rate of adoption.
Germany's “Green Dot” initiative levies taxes against manufactures that over package so once again you were on the mark with your suggestion. If you want to read more about this visit Germany has been very successful in its fight against growing garbage heaps [11]
As well there are bold new technologies being considered to assist in closing the loop on recycling. Coca-Cola has launched their new PlantBottle with limited distribution in order to focus on building recycle capacity quickly. NatureWorks has a recycling program for PLA . Krones offers bottle-2-bottle recycling systems that produce PET flakes used in the production of PET bottles.
In my option there will be no single solution to post consumer waste but a number of application dependent solutions to select from.
We've just been discussing incentives to recycle and once again Sweden hits the news with a bottle bank arcade machine [12] that has recyclers queuing up to play.
The fun factor should not be underestimated in motivating behavioral changes even if the topic is serious there is room for creative solutions.