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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.
Sorta like the returnable, refillable stubbies for beer that we used to have; right?
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
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.
Wipe your butt with someone elses butt
Because it’s inventors likely barely remember the 90s. They were too young.
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.
From the article: "The model is similar to milk deliveries in the early 20th century,".
Still getting the model to work for more products than just milk can make sense.
I am not fully convinced though. There are a few brands participating, but it is not something universal, and I feel this will only really take off if there is a certain critical mass. They claim "50-75% better for the environment than conventional alternatives", but I'd like to see the details (e.g. what they compared to - cardboard vs plastic vs glass, etc).
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.
If they were to set up in the city I live in, they would use 100% hydro-electric electricity, so it would use no fossil fuels.
Or, they're well aware that not much has changed since the 1990's, because it was not very long ago.
" picked up for delivery back to a cleaning and sterilization facility "
Pickup, delivery, cleaning and sterilization all require energy use.
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
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.
That's the funny/ironic part.
Glass containers were eliminated solely out of greed, as a way to increase profits. But, as it turns out, single-use containers made of plastic or cardboard are superior in every respect -- cost, weight, and hygiene.
Now, the faux-environmentalist hipster douchebags want to eliminate what has been proven to work and go backwards, to the "good old days" of dirty, poorly sanitized, reusable containers.
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 ...
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.
You're right about industry best practices for hygiene, cost, and implicitly energy use and environmental impact, but, It's not fucking Tony Blair you piece of shit britbong.
You use electric heaters, and then the electricity can come from anywhere.
...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.
But, as it turns out, single-use containers made of plastic or cardboard are superior in every respect -- cost, weight, and hygiene.
Superior, except for that whole tedious environment thing. But that's somebody else's problem if you're affluent enough to own a computer and post on Slashdot, so fuck 'em, right?
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
So in your head, P&G is run by millennials, is it? Right...
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).
Incinerating the used-up, single use, pristine-before-filled packaging would be environmentally optimal solution, for as long as it is carbon neutral - i.e. for as long as original material, or energy for its synthesis, was not derived from underground fossil (hydro)carbon deposits.
milk, the baby cow's food?
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!
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.
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.
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