I’m sure it works in a similar way, for the same reasons it’s impossible to actually create powdered water.
source: science
Since we live in the first Nerf Civilization, where life itself is safely padded for our protection, this will be a fail.
Probably seven or eight people a year would get seriously sick from bulk containers of dairy that weren’t properly closed, or some contaminant in the scoop or spatula used in the transfer process.
Then cable news would go apeshit with “BULK MARJARIN GONNA KILL UR KIDZ!!!” and it would be back to individual plastic tubs.
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It has to be an industry standard. For example, toothpaste tubes are a particularly bad packaging choice from a sustainability and waste viewpoint, but startups like this one – however admirable – will continue to be niche and boutique options for wealthy people until the big brands switch to a similar form.
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In Eastern Canada there’s milk in plastic bags. You buy the pitcher that hold the bags and that’s it. Minimal waste.
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Is that not what snow is?
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This is pretty interesting, and deserves a comparison test drive. For our household of three, per year.
"Bite"
Waste - twelve plastic or glass jars with metal lids.
Shipping - trucked to our house three times.
Cost - Three hundred and sixty buckadingdongs
Ego value - Look! Look! Look at how environmentally concerned I am!
Big honking tubes of store brand toothpaste
Waste - eight or nine tubes of thin metal that roll down to maybe 3/4 cubic inch apiece
Shipping - none, pick it up while I’m on a grocery shopping trip
Cost - about forty five buckadingdongs
Ego value - god dammit, I’m using the same fuckin’ toothpaste as my lawn guy
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Like I said, it doesn’t work at scale right now. But the tubes are, from what I’ve read, a particularly thorny problem from a waste point of view in comparison to glass or plastic jars with lids. The large corporations need to up their packaging game, and startups like this can set an example and give them a push in the right direction.
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Yeah that would be something I didn’t think about. It’s just wild how much stuff is individually packaged these days. I don’t really like it so it just fills up my trashcan.
Heck, why not have a slot in the interior wall to drop those used tubes, like bathrooms built in the '20s had for razor blades?
Probably take fifty years or so to fill up, and all that metal inside our walls would help shield us from Facebook’s mind control rays.
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I buy my yogurt from a small dairy in Ontario (Pinehedge Farms), that sells their yogurt in returnable glass jars. A dollar fee which I get back when I return the jar to the store, and they ship it back to the farm for reuse.
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Earlier in life, when I had more time to smoke weed and do “work” that no one asked me to, I feverishly “designed” a grocery store that had no individual packaging, just dispensers for everything. It was pretty fun, in a Dr. Seuss kinda-way to draw out machines for all the products I could think of. I still think about the square-tubed Saltine wheel whenever I eat Saltines…
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LOL
well, sure, I guess it’s possible if you’re going for greater volume.
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That is essentially how brandy came to be. Wine was concentrated by distillation in order to avoid shipping huge amounts of water around. The wine merchants discovered people liked the concentrate.
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You could probably make a refillable grocery dispenser for yogurt or other gooey substances, but butter needs to be refrigerated in solid form or it goes bad much more rapidly. A spatula I guarantee someone’s unmonitored toddler would treat like a Lik-M-Aid stick, with added cold germs.
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What happens with a product that is mostly water, like Windex: People say lookie, here’s the concentrate >gasp< how envirofriendly! Then they see that it’s 80% smaller but only 20% cheaper, and the skewed mathematics of common sense takes over. Plus which they are shamed when they realize what they’ve been paying good money for all along is 80% water. Plus which the sorry-ass sprayer bottle broke so I need another one of them anyway…
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TANG! Tang, Tang, Tang, Tang, Tang, Tang, Tang, Tang, TANG!
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In some cases it may be simple but in many cases it is quite difficult.
Proper mixing is an important part of a lot of gels and pastes and it isn’t necessarily easy to do on a home scale. It sounds like it works great for windex, but even some very “watery” products like that might have trouble dissolving the dry material effectively. Lots of people switched from powdered dishwasher soap to liquid because of frequently undissolved powder residue. Some solutions are sensitive to the water pH or mineralization which will vary from place to place. Powdered forms are subject to absorbing humidity and caking, which can be solved by individually packaged pellets, which may cut into some of the savings. Concentrated solutions may be more hazardous or unpleasant than the dilute versions.
I am all for this, it is a great way to reduce waste and even if it doesn’t work everywhere I am sure there is lots of room for improvement. I just find it really annoying when people are all “this is so simple and easy, why don’t companies do this? How stupid are the people who develop these products” – developing consumer products is really hard.
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That’s a perfect case for a targeted tax to add in the social cost of single use plastic that consumers with their ape brains don’t currently see. The fancy word for that is an externality. An even better plan would be to push for CO2 taxation, which would kill two birds with one stone.
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