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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

A new container system that gets rid of all waste - Design and manufacture a set of a few dozen or hundred re-usable containers of different shapes and sizes, and a system for printing environmentally friendly ink on them that can be easily removed. Start a department/grocery store that does not use any disposable packaging. Give tax incentives to companies that use this packaging. The printable labels would allow for market differentiation since package types are now standard. Trucks come around and pick up the empty containers from customers, or they can bring them back to the store.

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The problem is that companies currently get away with passing the cost of packaging disposal to the customer. So it's cheaper to use disposable packaging than have to arrange return transport, cleaning, etc, etc.

If companies were made responsible for their packaging, this kind of scheme could more easily become economical.

But even so, for many things, just reduced/alternative packaging would be a huge win.

An egregious example is shampoo. Especially the ones with pump-action dispensers (I won't even mention the glitter/plastic-microbeads that many shampoos contain). These containers use a good deal of plastic, and are surely bad for the environment. An alternative would be that you own a nice pump-action dispenser, and buy shampoo top-ups in plastic pouches - or even take your dispenser to the store where it's filled by tap. I believe I have seen something like the top-up pouches, it should be strongly encouraged, with packaging taxes of some kind.

i think germany has some sort of packaging or recycling tax.

for your products you can either arrange to take them back, or you pay a tax according to what would it cost to recycle.

for electronics for example that can't be fully recycled or put on a landfill or burned because of dangerous materials that tax should be accordingly higher.

Germany’s equivalent to US blue recycling bins is the yellow bin or yellow bag. It is exclusively for all kinds of wrapping and containers (except paper and glass) - because the disposal gets payed for by the producer of the product and wrapping. The same item (e.g. a plastic container or even a coat hanger) could go into the yellow bin or into regular garbage only depending on whether it came as packaging of another product or bought it standalone. The black “rest” garbage bins people need to pay fees for. It incentivizes producers to reduce wrapping or use materials that are more environmentally friendly like paper or glass. Most bottles (both plastic and glass) also don’t go into the garbage but are returned by consumers to the grocery stores for cash back (there are machines you just throw your bottles into and it spits out a receipt to cash in at the register).

This is one of the most important problems to solve hands down. And not just for environmental reasons. I live alone and produce mountains of waste even though I consume very little. Every item I buy comes wrapped in unneccessary amounts of plastic. By the end of each week I have bags full of waste that shouldnt be there. I dunno how to solve for this but it´s seriously mind boggling how much waste is produced that has no reason for being there.

The only way to win is to not play.

Seriously, did you truly "need" everything you purchased new and could you have gotten it second hand or forgone?

I already hear grumbling from the crowd, "opportuniy cost", "time", "but shiny!", etc.

That is the trade off for not feeding a system energy that is demostrably destroying everything of true value on this planet.

It's worth it.

I think the grumbling you hear from the crowd is their stomachs. People have to eat.

Yes. That would be a good place to start.

here where i live, a second hand market does not exist. it is not in the peoples culture. on the other hand you can buy a lot of food in bulk without it being prepackaged. but even that does not help because i need to put every item in a bag so it can be measured. for fruits and vegetables i can often put multiple items in one bag, but for sugar or flour that doesn't work, so no matter if i buy prepackaged or bulk, i end up with a new piece of plastic that i have to throw away.

I'm not sure about your bulk store but where I live you can just bring a reusable container or cloth bag or something, weight it and put your goods in that.

yeah, that works in shops where you can talk to the owners. they will actually appreciate not having to use their bags since that saves them money. but in large supermarkets the employees usually don't have the courage to deviate from what they are told to do.

or it's simply not practical because the scale is not close enough and i'd be blocking it for to long. on busy days there is often a waiting line to get stuff weighed. so really this only works if the shop expressly designs for reusable containers.

You produce small hills of waste. Not mountains.

The waste feel needlessly big because you touch and see it. But on a real level, your and mine personal trash does not matter.

Nonsense.

I could flesh out my argument: I'd guess¹ 99%+ of damaging environmental events happen out of sight from us end consumers.

¹ Open to seeing real numbers if they exist!

Some implementation questions:

How do you ensure that they get properly sterilized/cleaned after every use?

How many years of life are you aiming at? What is your system for finding containers at the end of their life that may soon fail?

What weights are you aiming for. What strength are you aiming for. What about padding?

What price point are you aiming at for each container?

How easily removable is the ink? What happens if the ink gets removed in transit? Is the store allowed to re-ink that, or are they required to ship the package as damaged back to the manufacturer.

How do you ensure that the package has not been tampered with?

Given that this will result in extra bulk and weight compared to a custom designed package, (which we have now), how confident are you that this would end up being carbon neutral?

Sounds like living packets. https://livingpackets.com/

This is a bit different but it looks like a step in the right direction.

This looks like it belongs in a video game.

This is exactly how it should be handled. If there's no monetary benefit for a particular organisation, it's gonna continue the same way it has always been continuing. Policies, rules and Government backing is a must for a proper waste management. If there is a proper tax incentive plan even retailers and supermarkets will be interested. All in all we are talking of collection of waste and processing it and providing incentives to entities which generate this waste.

Our local organic store (ecoindian) has returned to the older model where we take boxes/bottles to the store, fill them up and bring them back home. Thy have an easy way to weigh what we buy by taring our containers first. So I guess they use only the packaging required for bulk transport. This also let's us purchase what we need and not have excesses that can get spoilt just because someone decided that 1kg is a magical quantum.

How do you determine that personal waste or packaging waste is a big problem relative to others? I admit as a non-expert, I always hear about huge statistics of packaging waste and my first reaction is extreme skepticism that it’s actually a meaningful problem, and that sorts of confounders around rate of product breakages, lost items, sanitary transit, etc. would just mean it’s not worth it to try to reach a more global optimum of supply chain waste compared to the local optimum that modern efficient logistics are incentivized to meet.

It seems like one of those things that sounds like a big deal, like recycling, but when you look into it, it’s actually not cost effective to address it except a few special cases.

I and at 3 different sets of friends of mine have all tried and stopped using home meal delivery services due to disgust with all the packaging that comes with them. Now I might live in a bubble, but I do believe there is sentiment out there that it's not only an issue of quantity of waste generated, but also an aesthetic and philosophical issue as well. I personally find generating trash in any quantity to be offensive, and the idea of plastic floating around in the ocean disgusts me. Some will call it irrational but that doesn't mean there's not a need.

On one hand I really respect your directness because you’re admitting it’s purely an aesthetic preference and not data-driven optimal environmental policy. That’s a perfectly good point of view and a fine reason to take something up as a business, especially if many other people feel like you do too.

On the other hand, waste is a literal side-effect of all possible life, going all the way to level of entropy always increasing. All life processes produce waste, even digital life would produce waste heat and whatever electricity generating process it consumes from can’t be 100% efficient.

I view modern packaging as a really amazing invention. People can mail me a fragile piece of art from across the world and it can reach me quickly and safely. Factories can massively produce safely sealed food items that prevent literally tons of food waste through packaging, increasing nutrition availability, water availability and more.

Most modern packaging is virtually a miracle.

Where I agree with you about packaging waste though is when it is used for branding and designed around aesthetic form or market testing rather than utility. Disposability is not a harmful goal at all, but waste generated purely to support branding is hard to defend.

This is also relevant for containers used in logistics of things to the store. There is so much single use cardboard boxes used in fruit exports for example.

You've just invented shipping containers.

At a micro scale

I think GP has probably consciously drawn inspiration from shipping containers to solve a smaller-scale problem.

No, they’ve just invented recyclable containers with a large enough deposit to be worth reusing. Milk bottles are the classic example of this.

Ban plastic containers and you’re halfway there.

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