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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.
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).
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.
New York style pizza IS greasy cardboard.
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 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.
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?
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.
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