To reduce plastic packaging, ship products in solid form

[MTHead]

@fuzzyfungus

drinking something that tastes like warm seawater slightly sweetened is something you do because electrolyte imbalances can kill you unpleasantly, not because it’s a pleasant experience.

Yes, this is why I only drink Gatorade when I feel I actually need it. The formula has been tweaked over the decades to be much more pleasant; when I was a kid, my dad’s dictum made much more sense:
“If it tastes good to you in the moment, that means you need it; if it doesn’t, you don’t need it and shouldn’t be drinking it.”

[TheyCallMeMrPibb]

@fuzzyfungus

A jar of toothpaste could end up pretty gnarly

I don’t know if you looked at the link from @gracchus’ post, the jar contained a large quantity of individual “servings” of toothpaste each wrapped in what I guess is some sort of digestible coating. I really don’t see how wrapping up two hundred individual pellets of toothpaste is ever going to be price competitive with pouring the same quantity of paste into a tube at any scale.

@fuzzyfungus

the ‘pump’ style dispensers used for soap and lotion and stuff

Now that would work! I think I remember seeing toothpaste in just such a package some years ago, you unscrewed the pump top and connected a new, full reservoir of paste when needed. Make the reservoir out of some readily recycleable or degradable material and we’re there!

[SamSam]

@EricHunting

Even in space this shift in paradigm will become necessary. The transport of bulky ‘faberge egg’ payloads of astronomical value by gigantic rockets with outrageous engineered reliability just makes no sense if you can establish a production capability in orbit and leverage that capability on the commodification of payloads, thus applying the ‘tolerable throughput yield’ paradigm of conventional industry to space transport. That’s the real key to CATS. This is why I forsee the eventual obsolescence of rockets --albeit it heresy in space advocacy circles.

I’m sorry, I think I missed something, because cats will never be a good solution for rockets. I’ll grant that their intuitive sense of orbital mechanics is good, but they are wholly unreliable and terrible at following basic protocols.