Loop Seems Like a Logistical Disaster That Might Work | Hacker News Reader

Loop Seems Like a Logistical Disaster That Might Work

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17 pointssmacktoward9 comments

They have to get this into grocery stores for it to work, IMO. I need to be able to bring back a pile of dirty containers, throw them in a bin, get back credits covering X new container purchases, and then go walk into the store and buy new things in the same sort of containers. To get started, all you should have to do is just buy something. The containers themselves should be as re-usable as any cheap Tupperware clone.

Shipping this stuff back and forth is pants-on-head retarded. It needs to be washed and sanitized in-store and filled up with bulk goods in-store.

The stores could send them to a local sanitation depot. I've seen setups in cities where all the restaurants used such a service. When you sat down the restaurant would issue you set of plates and bowls in an autoclave bag. You got to open it yourself so you knew it was fresh. At the end of the meal the dirty dishes were scraped and dumped into a bin for cleaning.

This already exists in a small way. I use a local dairy that ships milk in thick glass containers with a $1.50 deposit. Any store that sells it will also handle returns.

And I can remember a time when soft drinks came in glass bottles and the stores took them back for a deposit refund.

I got really confused when I saw Loop a few weeks ago as it seems really similar to https://www.loopindustries.com/en/, which is a Canadian company working on plastic manufacturing that has already partnered with lots of the industries (beverage, cosmetics) that the org in this article would like to target. They don’t seem to be the same organization though? The similarities even go down to the logo...

> Reusing the containers will save more material and energy than fashioning new ones each time—even with all the additional shipping.

I 100% do not believe this.

Show me the analysis. Open up the data and code.

Otherwise, I don't 100% have any idea.

Don't just think of shipping the container back to the bottling plant. Think of producing raw materials, then shipping the raw materials to the refinery, the refined materials to the container factory, and the new containers to the bottling plant. Roughly, this seems like x < x + y + z + w, which should be uncontroversial.

They don’t ship that stuff one container at a time.

This completely ignores the economy of scale. The process of supplying containers to the factory is highly efficient, which is why only a little fraction of price you pay for the product corresponds to the container. You're replacing this with containers each being shipped on their own airplane and the postal service having to personally process each and every one (and do containers themselves need a box to ship them in?).

And that's ignoring the fact that Loop container is much heavier than a typical plastic container which makes shipping it even more expensive.

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