This is very interesting, but I can’t help but feel that a glass bottle with a metal cap (and one of those Dutch condiment spatulas) would be just fine for all these applications and also be more easily and effectively reused and recycled.
I re-use jam jars for food storage, drinking glasses, mini herb gardens, etc. and could incorporate bottles, jars, and other glass containers into a variety of needs around the house if they were designed with second and third lives in mind.
Add in health effects of microplastics/chemical leaching and glass is again a winner.
Transportation costs and breakage are perhaps higher, but maybe that’s a cost we should accept?
> Transportation costs and breakage are perhaps higher, but maybe that’s a cost we should accept?
I suspect that transportation and breakage costs are higher only because we don't account for externalities when considering plastic: in other words producers don't sustain the full costs and are effectively subsidized by the society at large and the environment (through increased healthcare spending, lower QOL, higher obesity rates, lower fertility, and other environmental costs that will be sustained by future generations).
Glass has externalities as well. If all transportation weight is significantly higher that is going to have a large impact on global warming until we switch to clean transportation which to be frank is a long ways off if we are being honest.
Meat, plastics, metals, gas, everything that generates greenhouse gases in significant amounts has to become costlier so people consume it less.
It's been proven time after time that we won't reduce emissions by appealing to the social conscience of people and corporations, but everybody obeys economic measures.
They're not specifically intended for condiments (most jam jars are low and wide enough that they can be scraped with a spoon), but for storing more viscous liquids in larger glass (milk) bottles, like yoghurt or vla.
You know? Maybe a few dozen standard sized and broad/wide necked tops made out of laboratory grade glass would do. That stuff is almost indestructible and does not leach or take on anything in the concentrations used for food/drink stuff. Not even tea or coffee stains! So there is the question of the returns. Why returning
when you could have a refill machine in store which could clean them fast in safe ways before refilling? For anything more than a few bottles, use reusable kegs and plug them into an appliance at home? Or those watercooler canisters? I recently saw milk in a plastic bag again, like it has been about 40 years ago?
Interestingly that bag wasn't sloppy or wobbly at all, because on one side it had a handle, which felt like it was inflated with something, which made it stiff. Still one time use only, though less material.
For reference, this is what we do with beer bottles in Germany. There’s two standard bottle types which you can return to shops, which take any brand, as long as it’s the standard type. They return them to a cleaning facility which distributes them back to the breweries (extremely simplified, there’s lots of details like a mandatory deposit on reusable bottles consumers pay to incentivise returning them to stores).
But basically, bottles get reused as long as they’re usable. It works quite well!
Nopetynope. I don't remember where exactly anymore because I rarely buy beer, but I think it was Lidl where I returned some Tsingtao bottles and heard the machine crushing them, thinking WTF?!
Edit: I know this isn't true for every glass bottle, but it happens. There are one way glass bottles in .de
Which you still have to return, to get the 8 or 15 cents(don't know exactly) back if you care.
Yeah, there are some intricacies as I said, didn't want to turn this into a long-form essay (because that's what you need to describe anything formalised in Germany). Lidl doesn't participate in the bottle sharing initiative as far as I know for example; differently-shaped, one-way bottles are definitely a thing; and sometimes, there are deposit machines that for some reason don't accept a local brewery, although they should.
But all in all, this system definitely ensures at least a big part of German bottles are actually reused multiple times.
K, but what I really meant to say was rather why do the bottle return thing at all, if you could have a few standard bottles which last decades, and fill them at the store, supermarket, etc. from kegs, canisters, and return only those, instead of single bottles?
Edit: where the kegs/canisters take the part of standardized liquid containers, as it is common in gastronomy already?
Just need to have a machine which can do the refills from store to longlife bottle quickly and clean at the store.
Editedit: Trying a braindump, from my impressions over the past decades, even long before "Grüner Punkt" and other return systems, just regarding bottles.
In larger supermarkets, and stores specializing in selling bottled stuff, there are always large areas for the returns, inside and outside. All for gathering and storing that stuff, to send it back to whereever and whenever. Sometimes with larger forklifts, stacking pallets/boxes 3 storeys high. (about 9 to 12 pallets, or boxes)
So you mean local bottling at each store with standard bottles? I like the idea, but the challenges are quite tough.
- No branding/consumer information possible on the bottle
- carbonized beverages can‘t just be poured in free air like juice or milk, a large facility is needed
- beverage stores would have to pump dozens of different beverages through one machine, that would always mix a little bit of the last filling
- that facility must follow strict hygiene requirements which makes it expensive
Let's ignore the machines for a while(waves hands...). I think that is possible. Think of the the ones giving all sorts of coffee in a cup, but also soups, like in some companies canteens.
I've thought about the carbonizing thing. Let's say there are glass cylinders of common sizes and proportions, made out of light, and nearly indestructible laboratory glassware. Everybody has a few of them, like knife, fork and spoon, kitchenware, and so on. Why not have the cylinder open on the top, with a screw thread?
Several sorts of caps precisely fitting onto that thread, sealed when latched on? Then there could be a module like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codd-neck_bottle for anything sparkling as the 'cap' being screwed and latched onto that cylinder. As one of many options. Think bottle lego! :-)
As for the branding, consumer information? Some sort of e-paper, or some RFID with a little bit of storage would surely do? (Also modular, so you can either change it, without throwing away the base bottle in case of defect, or vice versa. Because shit always happens)
Edit: Thinking further about it, It vaguely seems this could also be applied to most stuff which ships in tin cans. Like soups, Ravioli, and so on.
Editedit: Regarding the large facility...These already exist for baking pre-baked stuff, so you have the illusion of freshness.
It could also save a massive amount of store space because there could be one area with all sorts of filling stations, with the canisters plugged in behind the scenes. Instead of having rows of rows of stacked bottles or tin cans which need to be restocked continuosly.
Regarding deliveries, could be similar. All the "ghost kitchens' having such systems, filling those common containers with their common caps, from a common pool.
The small modular bottles for consumers just shuttling back and forth locally/regionally in that pool, while the larger ones only making it back and forth between delivery hubs and producers. No matter if Supermarket or delivery from some 'ghost kitchen'.
You’re right about the bakeries, if they were willing to do that they might as well start out with a filling machine, doesn’t have to cover all products at once :)
Actually I’ve seen this at one or two upscale supermarkets. They had a larger filling station for cereal, candy and other dry goods but it wasn’t the supermarket itself that sold those. Similar to an in-store “Unverpackt-Laden” (no packaging store).
In my opinion it would be more realistic to start out with dry goods to save emissions. The German bottling system is not so bad to begin with and could be improved later.
> Plastic American-style milk bottles are funnily enough one of the only easily recycled plastics, if I am remembering correctly.
I don't know about the recyclability of those plastics, but I wouldn't be surprised. They're basically two pieces of plastic screwed together without any seal, and it works well enough!
That sound you heard was me rolling my eyes at the bunch of nonsense they started off with, which seemed sucked straight from the mouth of a plastics industry PR lackey. The squeeze nipple thingy is pretty brilliant, but an ecological disaster.
As a cook I find the squeeze actually sort of frustrating. Sometimes it usefully delivers the right amount of ketchup (or mustard, or whatever) to its destination; mostly it splatters. In any case I still have to use a knife to spread it around.
Solving the leaky bottle upside down problem is too narrow a focus.
McDonalds does that with cardridges in a (don't know the exact word) squeeze gun, and it mostly comes out in the same volume. They also had funnels for ketchup and mustard, where you pushed once, and got more or less the same amounts per push.
I remember when ketchup came in glass bottles and you had to use a knife to get it out. I'm much happier with the squeeze bottle era. I like reusability, but I also like things not being a pain to use.
I just wanted to chime in with a tip for people who are struggling to get every last drop of tasty condiments out of containers. There are tiny rubber condiment spatulas designed to aid you in your quest for total condiment use. They are also useful for skin care products, but I wouldn't suggest using the same ones for both applications.
There's a book from 25+ years ago on the design of cardboard boxes which goes to similar levels of obsessive detail. Part Art college, design school, industrial design and part coffee table book.
Cardboard, it's origami for industry: sheet form, now optimise assembly, cost and structural integrity alongside ease of production...
When I was in high school, we had a hands-on project in geometry for making nets, which is the name of the geometrical outline of a box when disassembled and laid flat [0]. I remember my teacher saying that if you wanted to make it big with geometry, you should go into the business of making nets for retail companies. All these years later I can see the wisdom.
If any of them date from the 1970s, they're good candidates. Didn't recognize the covers but there's often more than one edition of a book. Nice find! they look to be in the same class, possibly even better!
I wish I could remember. My mum used to bring these things home from the art college library on long loan. It was by an industry professional, on the processes to design efficient boxes, packing, cardboard constructions. I can't find it online.
It's incredible that we designed a material for robustness that takes hundreds of years to break down, and it is the default material for designing single use everyday items, and then rely on all the efforts of an ineffective recycling program to maybe get a couple more uses out of it.
It's not really "incredible" when you consider that material properties like "robustness" and "years to break down" aren't sliders you can adjust willy nilly. It just turns out stuff that can break down, break down really fast (eg. cardboard), and the ones that can last at least a year or two, last for centuries.
The material you’re taking about, plastic, is made from carbon stored inside of the Earth. If we can reliably get it back in the Earth, e.g. via landfill, then I don’t see a huge issue with it. Also, wood was a forever material prior to the evolution of white rot.
Human manufactured Wooden objects are not found in remote places on earth. Tiny specs of wood are definitely not found in bodies/blood of humans including infants.
Single use wooden items don’t cause flooding and damage wildlife.
These are not the same. They don’t have the same problems.
So much so that it has to be recycled using a separate process that many places refuse to adopt in Switzerland. I believe it’s either because it’s too complicated or because you have to license it from tetrapak and it’s too costly.
AFAIK its paper, sure but laminated with aluminum and plastic so good luck separating the layers into recyclable stuff.
Not that recycling is a panacea in the first place… more like a gimmick to make us feel good about wasting so much instead of questioning the methods of the industries producing all the waste in the first place.
To be blunt your argument for polluting our environment doesn't feel like it's in good faith when you blame wood for being a pollutant until a fungus showed up hundreds of millions of years ago. I absolutely loathe the term "whataboutism" but this seems like a real example - "what about the fact that wood was a pollutant hundreds of millions of years ago? We should be able to dump plastic now".
His point is that nature adapts to these things and learns to consume them eventually. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with storing plastic in the earth, as long as it isn't disrupting ecosystems.
Nature is a complex dynamic system. Yes, it can adapt to new influences without becoming instable.
But needlessly bombarding it with artificial chemicals surely has some kind of threshold over which adaptation mostly fails, equilibria get destroyed and the system becomes indeed instable.
> ... as long as it isn't disrupting ecosystems.
Problem is, who can reliably tell when it'll be too much?
IMO not worth risking "everything" for some added convenience of "ingenious" food packaging.
"Nature" is arbitrarly defined. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with anything. "Wrong" is a human definition. "Nature" is perfectly fine with wood and plastic piling up for eternity without decomposition if no organism happens to evolve to do so. "Nature" is fine with human genocide. "Nature" is fine with a nearby supernova or asteroid destroying all life on earth.
The point is that from a human perspective, and from the perspective of most multicellular organisms, plastics discarded into the environment are a really bad thing for our health.
It would be somewhat ironic if a bacteria were to evolve to eat plastic and be invasive. An organism like that would have quite an effect on humanity's habits.
Specific species of bacteria have indeed been found that can catabolize specific types of plastics.
In some niches they will definitely evolve to decompose plastics.
Since all life forms on earth rely heavily on water as solvent (being present ideally all the time), those 'invasive' bacteria won't have that much of an effect on humanity's habits IMHO, since regularly removing the water easily keeps their impact low.
Fungi might play an important role in decomposition of plastics as well, since they have advantages over bacteria that may be relevant for decomposition of plastics in the same way in which they are for decomposing wood.
(Which is difficult for bacteria)
Heinz Ketchup Cap: may have solved the problem of storing the bottle upside down, but it doesn't solve the problem of 3% of the product remaining in the container and being almost impossible to retrieve.
Sriracha Bottle Cap: it's a fun design, but in my experience it tends to turn filthy, sticky and basically break. Kind of terrible, really.
Vita Coco Bottle Cap: okay if it works, very annoying if it doesn't. The whole container is a recycling nightmare, fwiw.
The main packaging issue is the single-use target. In the past we have had a concept and an industry about recycling packages in various ways but to "simply" and "make things more efficient so profitable" we decide that a single-use solution is better.
That's was true in an age of raw material abundance where a light and disposable package means less transportation cost, simple infrastructures, less distributed human labor requirements etc. You can pack milk in a factory and directly ship it to stores where the only need is putting them on some supermarket shelf. In the past there is a need for glass bottles who are fragile and heavyweight, they need to be cleaned up, there is an industry to wash/recycle them, many stages in line etc...
The result of modern food packaging is that we are able to concentrate stuff, few big factories in exotic places, more products on shelves, cheaper product. However now we start seeing that such efficient move is not sustainable... I bet in the future we will came back somewhat, and such move will hurt MUCH...
While this is technology is beautiful, I think it would be easier to visualize how these products work by looking at old-fashioned still pictures of their disassembled parts.
And yet, I wish none of my packages had these, and would let me cut a corner off or stick to simple caps. I must have underdeveloped motor skills, but if there is one guaranteed thing to happen is that ketchup sprays everywhere, dosage caps get clogged and dry out, caps are placed such that I can't get all contents out, etc. etc.
For me, none of them work. And they often seem like an expensive component.
That’s because none of us truly want to give up what we have gained. You’re still commenting on a website using a computer or a phone. The only way this will fix is after the planet is truly fully fucked, where no amount of money can protect you from that, then humanity will figure out whacko ways to fix it. Many if not most will suffer indescribably, for sure. But I see no other way this will play out.
1. Reduce plastic consumption as much as you can.
2. Use reusable bags
3. Choose packaging that contains less plastic. This is truly horrible in the US. Apple sauce containers for kids have so much unnecessary plastic. I mean the ones with the fancy caps that are big only to appeal to kids.
And to reduce your carbon footprint further - controversial point incoming - reduce or stop eating meat.
“But, aren’t you using a smartphone? Do you not buy X? Do you not use X? Do you drive? Do you travel? …
All your points are therefore invalid“
When I’m hungry and someone offers a slice of pizza I don’t say no if I can’t have the entire pie. I take the slice. Start with a step today then take another one tomorrow.
Eventually there will be enough of us that we opt to tax companies at the source for using plastics unnecessarily or having a ridiculous carbon footprint. And May be we can have effective carbon capture technologies and better ways to deal with plastic.
Fascinatingly, single use plastic bags are so impossibly thin that you'd have to reuse a reusable bag more times than they're likely to last. I have not seen any data, but I'm willing to bet that our consumption of plastic has increased, with any reduction in single use plastic bags more than offset by an increase in "reusable" bags.
If instead of normalising the use of reusable bags, we normalised soft plastics (LDPE) recycling, the planet would probably be in a better condition. A one cent tax per bag would probably be sufficient to pay for it.
(And don't get me started about cotton. If you only focus on climate change, cotton isn't too bad. But if you zoom out to look at environmental impact, petroleum doesn't hold a candle to cotton for the devastation of natural habitat, water use, energy use, etc etc etc. One t-shirt or tote bag is likely more environmental impact than all of the soft plastics used by one person in a year.)
It's unfortunate you're being downvoted. Your intuition is spot on. Here's [0] a report from the Danish Environmental Protection Agency about life cycle analysis of different shopping bags. See table 4 on page 18 in the summary. A cotton bag needs to be reused 7,100 times and an organic cotton one even 21,000 times to reach parity in its environmental impact compared to a single use plastic bag that's reused as a trash bag.
There's plenty of other studies. Just search for life cycle analysis of grocery bags or similar on Google Scholar.
For what it’s worth, I come back to check on my reply after 8 hours to find it has a score of 1. So if there has been any downvotes they have been perfectly balanced out by upvotes.
I’m not a fan on indiscriminate use of petroleum products but I really think people underestimate just how thin a single use bag is. Next time you finish a plastic bottle of milk or juice, weigh the container and see how many single use bags it takes to match that weight.
Single use plastic bags are a problem, but like plastic straws, they’re not even in the top 100 of culprits. People pick on them because they’re easy and because they’re symbolic.
My state recently started charging for bags. Guess what? People carry groceries in their hands when possible. Many bring their own bag plastic reusable bags.
It’s not just the energy required to create them. It’s that they’re virtually indestructible. They litter. They fly away. They break and leak plastic everywhere in the environment leading to microplastic found in blood of wildlife.
And this is just scratching the surface. I know it sounds like an educated view and it’s not entirely wrong but there’s more to it than what appears. Plastic is a problem and the less of it we use the better we and our next generations will be.
It is myopic to focus on the highly visible component of the greater problem (loose plastic bags in the environment) rather than a holistic view (total environmental cost of shopping conveyance).
To that end, does anyone know a good way to deal with dog waste that doesn't involve plastic? I feel like sealing dog waste away in this nigh-indestructible container is a really stupid idea, but I haven't yet thought of a better way of picking the stuff up.
Unless your concern is nuclear war, it’s absolutely a given that the planet can support great-grandchildren. The question is for how many and at what quality of life.
There are no science-based projections of us not being able to support human life with a population of less than 100 million still in 200 years.
Second paragraph: “Behind each plastic bottle cap is a careful engineering process that balances cost, user experience, and manufacturability at massive scale.”
Clearly a reference to [1] but I'm too lazy to go and check if it's visible to the naked eye. If not, fun design and weird that there was no comment by the scanning folks.
It's weird that CT scans cost hundreds (thousands?) of dollars when used in medicine but at the airport everyone's baggage is routinely scanned for approx. $free.
Is the hardware and software needed for CT scans really that expensive or not?
People are saying it’s not the same but counterpoint: An MRI scan in a state of the art facility in Chennai India in at least 50 different facilities costs 2000-4000 Rupees or $26. The machines cost the same if not more here due to import duties. Labor is cheap but these labs truly compete with each other and that’s what drives the price down. So please acknowledge that the healthcare system in the US and other places is broken.
A pure CT Scan in Germany (paid for by public health insurance unless you do one for fun), without anything else (consultation, contrast materials, etc.) is billed 110-170 € (USD 120-190). Considering labor is more expensive here, that sounds comparable.
But what is the 'real cost'? Is it that much higher in Germany than the USA? What does the CT tech make, how much was the machine to buy, how expensive is the rent where the machine is installed, what are electricity costs...
For contrast (pun!), Switzerland just across the border charges 6–7 times as much for the same thing. And medication too, it costs multiples more for the same medicine in CH than anywhere else in Europe just because.
You also earn closer to US salaries. A friend of mine moved to Switzerland, and he jokes that Swiss cleaners at the border hire German cleaners for their places ;)
Indeed. It doesn't mean either the US or the Swiss aren't getting gouged when it comes to health prices (and prices in general in CH).
But yes, AFAIK, there is no minimum wage in CH but the defacto minimum wage hovers around 50--60k CHF a year and 20 or 25 days PTO. On the other hand, health insurance alone with a 2500 CHF deductible and 10% copay afterwards costs 300--400 CHF a month no problem.
You say this like it is a good thing. Do folks at the bottom third have to endure the same sort of poverty, earning wages their parents earned yet paying more for everything?
Oh, I'm guessing you just mean folks that are in certain fields, and that really isn't representative of US wages. Normal folks are pretty poor.
> Oh, I'm guessing you just mean folks that are in certain fields
I guess it was a bit roundabout. The USA being the USA, people are often severely underpaid, which does not seem to be the case in Switzerland. But considering where we are, I mean tech salaries, which are pretty high.
Here in Switzerland healthcare is pretty much broken when it comes to prices. Everything is pretty expensive. But is it broken like in the US? No way! Our healthcare works very well and its prices are okay ;-)
Airport baggage scanners are nowhere near the complexity of CT machines. Not even the same kind of device. They also don't have to be designed and certified for human subjects.
> The CT scanner can create 3-D images of the contents of a bag, allowing TSA officers to rotate the images to better analyze the contents. In the future, the CT scanner may allow passengers to leave laptops and liquids inside of their carry-on bags, TSA officials say.
Airport scanners are not CT. They will only give you one projection. I would also be willing to bet these CT machines can only scan a very small volume. Typically, they will rotate the sample, not the X-ray source and detector. I’d imagine some of the cost comes from being able to move the source and detector while keeping everything in alignment. (Disclaimer: My experience is secondhand with scanning metals)
The passenger checkpoint devices are projection imaging, but they do use CT (with rotating source/detector, just like a medical CT) for checked bags. https://www.envimet.com/en/product/examiner-xlb/
Newer ones are actually moving to CT. If you go through one of those security checkpoints, you don't need to take anything out of your bag. They were being used at some terminals at Heathrow - but confusingly not all. I think T2 has them, or at least were trialing them when I flew in September 2020. T5 definitely didn't in January.
Nitpicking detail; the standard belt-scanners don't give you 'one' projection, but have (most probably) a linear detector with a (nearly linear) x-ray source pointed at, so they give you a slit-scan image, which is not one projection, but a veeeeery long image :)
I think it's several reasons. One more complicated machine. Two higher paid professionals. And finally healthcare is a racket in the US (cost to value wise).
I had a scan done a few months ago and marveled a bit at the machine. It was 20 years old but the room it was in was probably very expensive to build. There was a considerable amount of electrical power going to the room. And you can't just let a newbie run the machine. The liability alone of having a patient with a metal sliver in their eye or piercing still installed must be insane.
A private full body cancer search MRT (the most expensive diagnostic I could find) costs 1340€ in Germany, many common use cases much less (340 for a joint).
Naturally it‘s free if a doctor decides you need one.
Of the two applications you describe, one is a super serious life or death situation where a single mistake could harm human life.
The other is an institutional monopoly that, while initially set up with lofty goals to save lives, has devolved into a suppressive tool that works against the common man.
The air port has an x-ray machine, not a CT scanner. The CT has a ring the spins around the object making a 3d image - they don't have that at the airport.
X-rays are quite cheap in the medical world (reading them is where the cost is, not taking the x-ray).
I suppose a CT is what I saw at the airport earlier this year then - maybe Houston? The technicians clearly had a 3d model and were manipulating it to view it from all angles.
Technically, one can also get a (simple) 3D model of something with 'linear tomography', e.g. when the 'sample' is moved under the x-ray source, which happens in classic baggage scanners.
I re-use jam jars for food storage, drinking glasses, mini herb gardens, etc. and could incorporate bottles, jars, and other glass containers into a variety of needs around the house if they were designed with second and third lives in mind.
Add in health effects of microplastics/chemical leaching and glass is again a winner.
Transportation costs and breakage are perhaps higher, but maybe that’s a cost we should accept?