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Comment by dane-pgp | Hacker News Reader

> With this mandate, now I can take my used shampoo bottle and refill it at the store (assuming stores offer this).

Do you really need a standardized bottle for this? As long as the shampoo dispenser measures how much product it dispenses, it doesn't matter what it dispenses into.

I suppose the machine (or attendant) needs to know what to do if the customer tries to buy 330ml but only has a 250ml bottle, and they might feel cheated if they over-fill the bottle and some product leaks down the side, but shops will be incentivized to make this less likely to happen if they want customers to come back.

There might also be a problem with cross-contamination of unclean containers touching a nozzle, which is taken seriously by some in the food service industry[0], but hasn't stopped restaurants offering Coca-Cola Freestyle machines to customers.

[0] https://cellarcraftuk.com/cross-glass-contamination-legaliti...

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Part of the reason of standardizing is to make sure the bottles are of a particular strength, quality, durability. Currently, some bottles break after a few uses, some break easily, some have unique caps that if you lose or break, you can never buy a replacement. Standardizing has many benefits, just look at mason jars. Look at standardization in other industries. Imagine if every company has their own standard tire? or phone charging port?

> to make sure the bottles are of a particular strength, quality, durability.

That sounds like something the free market can solve. If people want bottles that last 5 years, then some company can offer a 5 year guarantee, or there could be independent testing laboratories that verify these claims.

> some have unique caps that if you lose or break, you can never buy a replacement.

I think you're more likely to lose or break the whole bottle than just the cap, but in any case, I don't think the government needs to ban all innovation in bottle caps just to solve the non-existent problem of people losing those caps.

You're right, though, that if refilling machines needed bottles to have a specific opening type in order to connect to the machine securely, then the industry would need to settle on a common design. Fortunately there is already a manufacturers association which would make that possible:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_%26_Container_Manufact...

I don’t know if the free market can solve certain problems like these. Take the phone charger example. The EU is forcing it to standardize to USB-C. Do you see it as a good or bad thing? Couldn’t you say its going to limit innovation? But standardizing it helps cut down on e-waste and helps the environment overall.

I agree with the need to standardize phone chargers, but that's quite a different market. It is much more likely you'll let someone borrow your charger than borrow your bottle top, and also more likely that you'll buy a spare charger than a spare bottle top. Bottle tops are also probably easier to recycle than cables.

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