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A Coalition of Giant Brands is About To Change How We Shop Forever, With a New Zero-Waste Platform (fastcompany.com)
In the not-too-distant future -- as soon as this spring, if you live in or near New York City or Paris -- you'll be able to buy ice cream or shampoo in a reusable container. When you're done eating a tub of Haagen-Dazs, you'll toss the sleek stainless steel package in your personal reuse bin instead of your trash can. Then it will be picked up for delivery back to a cleaning and sterilization facility so that it can be refilled with more ice cream for another customer. From a report:
Loop, a new zero-waste platform from a coalition of major consumer product companies, will launch its first pilots this year. "While recycling is critically important, it is not going to solve waste at the root cause," says Tom Szaky, CEO and cofounder of TerraCycle, a company that is known for recycling hard-to-recycle materials, and one of the partners behind the project. "We run what is today the world's largest supply chain on ocean plastic, collecting it and going into Unilever and Procter & Gamble products and so on," Szaky says. "But every day, more and more gets put in the ocean, so no matter how much we clean the ocean, we're never going to solve the problem. That's really where Loop emerged ... To us, the root cause of waste is not plastic, per se, it's using things once, and that's really what Loop tries to change as much as possible."
Cardboard is cheap, light and easily recyclable. Is using stainless steel really better for the environment?
After all it needs extra collection and cleaning infrastructure (while there is an established paper / cardboard collection and recycling infrastructure), and has a much higher initial energy cost. The added weight (and thus higher emissions from transport) also needs to be taken into account.
So back to how it was in the 50-90s then
Why do they always pretend this is new?
'packaging' costs way more than the contents..
Sorta like the returnable, refillable stubbies for beer that we used to have; right?
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
the hot new meme is to Insta/Snap a pic of the stainless Haagen Daaz reusable container with a big steaming dump in it?
I have a revolutionary idea... hear me out. If soda companies would distribute drinks in glass bottles - pretty thick bottles so they're tough and hard to break - and include a "deposit" surcharge when the beverage was purchased, then when the customer returned the empty bottle they would get the deposit back. Then the softdrink company could sterilize the bottle and reuse it over and over!
Now, get this... imagine if milk was also sold in glass bottles. And, in tune with the modern convenience of Amazon where things are delivered right to your door, the milk could be delivered right to your home. Here's the kicker... you could leave your empty milk bottles right at your door, so the delivery person could then pick up your empty bottles for reuse! Zero waste!
Better known as 318230.
Glass and stainless steel can be sterilized at very high temperatures.
Imagine if you could buy milk in reusable containers!
They could deliver it for you at night in glass bottles, so you have fresh milk in the morning. The amazing idea is you can also leave out your bottles to be collected by the very same person delivering them. They could take the bottles back to the deopt, wash ,sterilise and re-use them.
To make it even more super-duper environmental they could even use electric vehicles to do the collection and delivery.
So futuristic.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Wipe your butt with someone elses butt
Is going back to giving poor people staples and not a credit card to buy delicious, low-nutrition processed food that comes in a very trash-heavy packaging. It would also be a lot healthier for them.
They just shit in everything.
Once had milk delivered in recycled bottles. As the usual race to the bottom happened, the bottles were cleaned less and less well until the day we had a bottle with visible mold and other dark garbage clearly on the inside surface. Compalined to the supplier, who took the bottle back. Weeks later, and they lied and stated the dark material was actually "in the grass". A race to the bottom AND a PR dept full of pre-prepared lies.
What made us finally give up on the services of the 'local milkman' was when the bottles he delivered were SOUR on the very first day. The supermarket milk (in plastic), when placed in a fridge, was good to drink even SEVEN days later.
Modern plastic/cardboard packaging, is not the 'work of the devil' as the neoliberal filth of slashdot would have you believe, quoting their dark lord, Tony Blair. No- it is the industry BEST PRACTICES evolution for cost, weight, and hygiene.
Tony Blair and his blairite scum worked to reduce garbage collection in the UK from once a week to once a month, using 'green' propaganda as an excuse all along. Where blairite councils followed this initiative, rat populations exploded, and hygiene related diseases not significant since WW2 reappeared once again- the real intention.
'Green' initiatives marketed at the sh-eeple (as opposed to industry regulation like clean air laws) have always been part of PRO-WAR propaganda. "Close to the earth" is literally the first and most enduring aggressive warfare rallying cry- and that is why Blair and his supporters use it.
Just like how if you turn in an empty propane tank to exchange it for a filled one, and all the refurbished ones are garbage because they're rusty and leaky, so I never turn my empty propane tanks and just get mine refilled -- I'm sure I'm going to LOVE drinking milk from a refurbished steel container!
What about bags and boxes of tortilla chips and cereals and the like that suffer damage in shipping and then again from the rough handling of store "placement specialists" who aggressively cram them into shelf spaces after playing football and hockey with them in the aisles? When I find a sixth of the product in unusable fragments at the bottom of package, repeatedly every single time, that is product waste. We're paying for that waste.
" picked up for delivery back to a cleaning and sterilization facility "
Pickup, delivery, cleaning and sterilization all require energy use.
I would rather not be exposed to god know whats from other people, thank you.
Wow you're off your rocker.
Tony Blair wasn't particularly green, but it was during his time as PM that a wave of local councils started to swing towards the green (especially Brighton & Hove). There was no central government mandate towards reducing waste collection, only requiring them to recycle more. Many councils reduced their regular waste collection to save funds, but only 2 or 3 ever tried monthly. Plastic burning wasn't approved or mandated by central government, that was a few councils that had failed to anticipate the amount or recyclable waste that they would collect and as a result couldn't process it.
Most of the issues you complain about were short lived and very local, and they were all caused by poor decisions by local councils. Given you're still complaining about it nearly 20 years after Blair left government, my guess is you live in Brighton.
For those outside the UK, Brighton is a small city on the south coast and consistently votes for the green party. As a result, they've not had reliable waste collection for 20 years. No other part of the UK has this problem.
Rather than junkie cardboard boxes to store my extra crap in I'll now have a great selection of far more durable containers.
Yes! Bring back the 50s!
Caution: Contents under pressure
The idea of using stainless steel containers for ice cream seems to be silly just for when you are handling the item. It's also going to let the heat at the ice cream as steel is a much better conductor than cardboard. Instead of having a separate pickup stream it would be easier to drop the containers into the recycling and divert them at the sorting centre.
As for the other items it seems very wasteful to be ordering these small things being delivered on their. It's be much better to partner up with the current online retailers to get them to stop using cardboard boxes and then push the new packaging to the retailers. Again let the recycling pick up the empty packages and divert as needed. Also let the recycling pick up the empty totes with a modification so that they aren't damaged. There's no need to to dispatch courier trucks around to pick up empty plastic boxes.
They want to create a duplicate system to pick up the items to recycle. Use what's already in place as people are used to it.
The plan is to shove tons of ads down the throats of a captive audience?
That is the only plan companies have these days.
Corporatism != Free Market
So they think that this will be accepted but wait until people have to follow the rules and then the 'stories' of dirty, re-used containers occurs, this will end a horrible death as it should.
New York-style pizza where the grease hasn't soaked into the cardboard?
Yet Another Garbage Bin to locate beside the other 47 different bins ...
It's a pretty safe bet that keeping this stuff clean will be a problem. Oh, and aren't we supposed to conserve fresh water?
So in this new utopia, the average re-use garbage can will have a few dozen stainless steel containers tossed into it. it'll get left at the street. A new special garbage truck will come by and dump the cans into the truck. Etc. etc.
So a lot of these things are going to get dented and dinged and otherwise marked up.
is the public ready to receive their jug of milk or pint of Ben and Jerry's in dented containers with worn labels? or will the containers all be unlabeled and instead we'll put them into plastic wrap to keep the lids on and everything fresh from tampering and put the branding on the plastic wrap? Of course the plastic wrap will have to be removed during cleaning and a new fresh one applied to seal the product and put a new "Best Used By XX/XX/XXXX" indicator on it before it goes back out...
R.S. "That sounds like using plastic containers but with more steps."
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
My father, who was a research chemist, once told me that the old, thick, returnable Coke bottles actually made good reaction vessels (think beakers), precisely because they were strong and could take the abuse of regular use.
...that's not the American way. Anyone who buys food & goods in reusable packaging is a traitor & a failure as an American. Consumerism means that we measure our success by how fast we can dig stuff up out of the ground & turn it into pollution. No country comes close to the success that the USA has achieved to date.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Aside from the pros/cons on the environmental aspect, I see this as a clever move by the branded manufacturers (think P&G, Unilever, Nestle, etc) to get the Amazon white-label crowd to come back into the brand fold. It's basically the same crap delivered to your door, so in order to differentiate from Amazon, they are using this environmental angle to get folks to pay a few bucks more. Not a terrible marketing plan, be interesting if they can make it work.
Iâ(TM)m in Bangkok. I bought some seaweed to snack on the other day. I misread the pack and thought it was a bulk bag. No. It is 100 individually wrapped one inch by three inch pierces of seaweed. Each one wrapped in printed plastic. Total weight of the plastic is 4x more than the amount of seaweed. It was also the cheapest bag sold based on the weight of the product.
Lose the white guilt, friend. Itâ(TM)s ok to blame the people at fault. They also donâ(TM)t give an iota of a fuck.
You order a delivery meal from a restaurant. A guy brings the food in regular restaurant bowls with regular utensils, not disposable. You eat your food. You put all the bowls, utensils, and waste food outside your door. The guy comes back later to pick everything up, and takes it all back to the restaurant which is better outfitted to handle mass dish cleaning and waste food disposal.
That is one of the weirdest trolls I've ever seen on Slashdot, which really takes some doing. I can't imagine what your motivation would be, given Blair's now been out of power for more than a decade. I mean, it reads like you're some kind of Kipper, but if you're a Kipper or a gammon (but I repeat myself), shouldn't you be frothing about migrants and Brexit? Lots of people on the right and left get angry about Blair, but I think you're the first to get this angry about his plastics policy (if such a thing even really existed).
Of course, Industry As We Know It will oppose that fiercely. Because they're cowards. They need a little help.
Industry (in sense of creating profit in an economy) is about difference, about getting ahead of the baseline. Common mode is subtracted. If you can burden every competitor, every player on the market with same load per unit of produce, they'll have no sound complaint to make.
Do any of these people live in the real world? The amount of people that have time to sort their trash and put things in a recycle bin is so minuscule that doing so doesn't even make a dent.
Find a way to do it auto-magically.
So you pickup your ice cream carton and it instantly freezes to your fingers. Great idea. What material are they using to seal the lid?
When my parents ordered a takeaway meal at a Chinese restaurant in the Netherlands, they used to bring their own pans. It was pretty common to do that.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Why not just have stores with machines that refill your container instead of selling you a pre-packaged item? I could see a shampoo machine where you put your container in the machine, select which shampoo you want, pay for it, and it fills your container for you. Same thing with other products, although ice cream would have to be distributed from a machine softer and then freeze at home. This way, not only does the company selling the product avoid packaging costs, but shipping the products to the stores would be cheaper in bulk, the stores would need less shelf space, and the end user would be responsible for cleaning their own reusable bottles.
Cardboard is cheap, light and easily recyclable. Is using stainless steel really better for the environment?
In a lot of cases yes. The phrase is "reduce, reuse, recycle" and you are supposed to do them in that order. Reusing is generally better than recycling. And just because you can recycle cardboard doesn't mean doing so is environmentally friendly. Any paper making (cardboard is essentially paper) is actually a pretty toxic and energy intensive process. If the stainless steel can see enough reuse cycles it easily could be a net improvement.
After all it needs extra collection and cleaning infrastructure (while there is an established paper / cardboard collection and recycling infrastructure), and has a much higher initial energy cost.
The paper recycling infrastructure is probably not as robust as you imagine it to be. Paper production is the fifth largest consumer of energy worldwide accounting for about 4% of global energy use.
The added weight (and thus higher emissions from transport) also needs to be taken into account.
I'm not quite sure you appreciate how heavy paper is. It's fairly easy to design a steel container that weighs less than a paper one for many use cases.
Yeah, I travel in Malaysia ans thailand quite a bit... I agree they don't give a fuck. They seem to be stuck at a 1950's level of caring about the environment.
They already stated the best case against their own idea. This quote:
"The goal isn’t as much to get you to change, it’s instead to create systems that don’t make you change–but have you then solve the issue in the process. Creating consumer change is phenomenally difficult. So the first question we asked in developing the model was why did disposability win? Why did it take over? I think it did because disposability is convenient and affordable."
But they need consumers to change - by collecting and returning their little containers. Which is inconvenient for the consumer. Idea dead, by their own definitions.
As another poster pointed out, in a humorous but absolutely true way: We've already tried this for soft drinks, for beer, for milk, and for other products. Re-usable containers even still exist - but almost only as a curiosity.
Take beer as an example: Your local craft brewery may have reusable bottles, but none of the big brands do. It simply doesn't make economic sense to transport all those empty bottles around, to check and clean and sterilize and re-label them. This may be unfortunate, but it is the simple truth.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
They're launching this service in New York and Paris now? I'd think waste streams in the USA and France are relatively well controlled. My understanding is that most of the ocean plastic is going down the rivers in developing countries, or did I hear wrong?
I clearly remember doing something pretty similar to this in the 1950s and 1960s with refillable soda and beer bottles. (Well, it was my father buying the beer, not me...) So, the idea is not new. The only real loser in this will be the California state government, which collects a "CRV" deposit of 0.10 or 0.20 on nearly every drink bottle (not necessarily refillable ones) and then makes it impossible to ever get the deposit back. This will punch a hole in that scheme, but I am sure the CA legislature will find another way to squeeze money out of their constituents. The new governor there is talking about taxing drinking water now.
Looks like Soviet Union was way ahead of its time, because of everywhere use reusable containers.
We started here, a long time ago. I remember grocery-store drop-offs of reusable containers. Obviously glass bottles are the most obvious one.
We decided that disposable made a lot more sense. It wasn't just about hygiene.
Disposable packaging meant that there could be a lot less package of the "refills". You were always welcomed to use your own reusable containers. Buy ice cream "refills" in very little, very light, very disposable packaging.
If now the disposable packaging is already too much, that's a real problem. But the solution isn't to revert to heavy reusable containers being produced, transported, cleaned, shipped, damaged, and contaminated.
I don't want someone else's ice cream container. But I really don't want huge items of garbage in my bins either.
And do we really need to have this same discussion again? You're going to send a truck to my door, to collect my metal box, to transport it with fuel, to clean it with toxic chemicals and potable water. Toxic chemicals that were produced in a factory, potable water that's needed elsewhere, fuel from equally terrible places, all of which is better than a few grams of cardboard?
If you want to get rid of cardboard packaging without producing any waste, just wet it and throw it onto street. Heavy traffic will break it down in about ten minutes. Light traffic in a week. The forest in a few days.
The problem is as it always was. We produce waste that no one else eats. The fun of plastic. Paper was never the problem.
But we ditched plastic grocery-store bags with reusable nylon ones. Because somehow we forgot that paper bags were fine for almost everything. And we really forgot that the grocery store has a dumpster full of cardboard boxes to give away. And we completely ignored the ten little plastic bags of fruit and plastic-wrapped styrofoamed meats inside of the nylon bags.
Love making jobs. Just say so.
Forgive my cynicism, but when I see things like "change how we shop forever", "sleek stainless steel package" (why "sleek"?) and "it will be picked up", I hear the overwhelming buzz of marketing, tinged with a distinct tang of BS. It's the difference between the rosy picture that a business or academia would like to paint, and the pragmatism of harsh everyday reality and behaviour. This sort of thing doesn't often take off unless it's legislated for - and when it does, it's usually way more niche than what was touted here.
The marketing department will ensure that there is a nice eco-unfriendly disposable plastic cover to hold the graphics and other worthless tripe so you won't mistake one possible content for the other.
This is how we lived. The milk came in glass bottles that you returned to the store for re-fill. Its always nice to see quality of life in America revert to the Soviet mean. I mean you are already ditching houses for tiny cramped condos on the regular. A guy living in a 400sq foot Manhattan studio with no car and now with bottles 50 other people have drunk out of might as well be living in the USSR -- he wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
This is announced on two minor websites and echoed on Slashdot. Not a barnstormer initiative. Also really foolish. I have dealt with reusable containers and it's a pain in the backside. I seriously doubt this reusable scam will survive. It's just vapid corporate cash in on something seen as "trending." It won't initially succeed. There will be a guilt campaign. People will actually analyzed the situation and figure out it isn't really solving anything and is in fact making things worse. Game over.
Can't we find them and penalize them rather than making everyone have to suffer?
I thought the main source of plastic in the Ocean was 3rd world countries and fast emerging consumer societies like Indonesia etc. Certainly the amount of refuse and muck on the beaches in Bali was an eye-opener compared to Australia which by and large has clean beaches and is careful with it's plastic refuse.
I can't see how any of this will work in those countries.
http://www.bulkbarn.ca/Reusabl...
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam