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."

Comments

Been There, Done That

[Mikkeles]

Sorta like the returnable, refillable stubbies for beer that we used to have; right?

Re:Glass bottles

[jiriw]

I'm the first one who likes the idea of recycling and reuse - My production of 'other' garbage is about three bags a year (40 liter of garbage each when closed, something like that?), one bag every three-four weeks of recyclable plastics and tins, one container of old paper every four-six months and concerning glass, many bottles I save to put my home brewed/self made beer/wine in. For the other glass, we have a system recycling over 80% of glass used.

However, before you use something heavy like glass, please research the environmental impact first. I know of experience, transporting liquids in glass can be very expensive (the postage to send a bottle of whisky half around the world is prohibitive - more than the import taxes). They add up to about half the transport weight, not even counting the need of sturdier crates. If (and that's a big if) transporting filled glass bottles and re-using them is more environmentally friendly than transporting filled plastic bottles, charging a return fee and recycling them when collected, I'm all for it. However, I want to know for sure that's the case.

The advantage of using stainless steel containers instead of glass, stainless steel can bend and thus needs to be less sturdy and bulky and therefor weighs a LOT less for the same volume than glass. Still more than plastic 'though. So, I see a better use case for stainless steel than for glass.