Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/05/31/just-say-haitch-two-no.html
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And that is going to reduce shipping. Because driving water around in trucks is not particularly efficient.
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I have tried such things various times over the years only to discover the next time I went to buy the concentrated stuff that it was no longer being sold. It may be a good way to reduce packaging but it needs to catch on.
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What’s old is new again…
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Sure, it’ll stop plastic waste - but how will you stop people from eating their Windex pellets?
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I switched from body wash to bar soap precisely because I hated spending so much money on what was mostly water. I would definitely try this for other things.
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Genuinely curious if anyone has tried powdered beer.
http://beerstreetjournal.com/powdered-beer-to-go-just-add-water/
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I do this with the Soylent meal replacement shakes. I buy the dry powdered version, which is sent in larger quantities for a cheaper price than the pre-mixed versions. Would definitely like to see this with more products like detergents, cleaners, etc.
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This is a really great idea, and most consumers won’t buy it.
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I have not and I will not. The reason I do all the other enviro things is so that I can have a proper beer without too much guilt.
That said most of the beer I buy comes from the microbreweries in my small town, of which there are (blessedly) now 4, 3 of which are excellent.
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I remember around twenty years ago there was a big push to sell cleaners in flimsy plastic bags that you could use to refill old plastic bottles. Seemed like a pretty good idea. And it would seem that it failed utterly to catch on.
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I recall hearing about this a couple years ago:
https://www.popsci.com/article/technology/how-make-powdered-booze-home
weird thing about that is - and tell me if I’m reading it wrong, it doesn’t seem to reduce the volume (which defeats the purpose of this boingboing article), because to make it you are adding alcohol to a powder until it is effectively dry, not condensing the alcohol in any way. i suppose if you evaporated alcohol, you don’t get concentrated alcohol, you just get alcohol vapor… right? i suppose you could evaporate all the water from something like vodka until you have something like rubbing alcohol. ha.
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No. Just… no.
smdh
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this is a excellent point for 3D printing. Ship the printing to the neighborhood. Have the neighborhood printer make the good.
so long packaging; so long scarcity.
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Ahh, thanks for sharing.
So, basically, powdered “beer” is actually just beer flavoring in some high-proof alcohol.
In terms of evaporating alcohol: that’s exactly how distilling works. Alcohol has a lower boiling point than water, so we start by boiling some low-proof alcohol (the mash).
The alcohol boils off first, and we capture the mostly-alcohol vapor, condense it back to liquid, and end up with a much stronger proof alcohol.
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I’m not sure how the beer you linked to works. It just made me think of the “Powdered alcohol” I had heard about a couple years ago and made me wanna look it up.
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I’m still waiting for Soylent Gold powder, made of dehydrated rich people.
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I tried an earlier version years ago, and it was pretty much just as terrible as it sounds.
There’s also thing I was wondering about with packaging for food like dairy products. I know it’s probably impractical but why can’t we just buy yogurt or butter without the packaging but bring our own containers for them? I mean aside from actually selling it that way which is probably complicated (maybe more wasteful?) I don’t see why this can’t happen. I mean we use to get milk delivered in bottles. Just a silly thought.
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