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Comment by drewdevault | Hacker News Reader

The only genuine path to sustainability is reduction. There is no sustainable way to have disposable single-use packaging that you throw away when the bottle empties. Glass bottles with a deposit to incentivize bottle return, following which they are washed and refilled with new product (ideally locally, with fresh ketchup arriving to local distribution centers in bulk), is a much more reasonable approach.

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Glass bottles are considerably heavier and bulkier enough that shipping becomes a non-negligible expenditure of energy.

There's a cost associated with bottle return as well. Consumers also may feel weird about buying used packaging.

What I have seen work quite well is bulk filling stations in hippie groceries. So far liquid dispensing is limited to non-food e.g. laundry detergent but if people can grasp that model I think it can expand to a lot more items.

Consumers _always_ feel weird about reused packaging? That is probably not true. Here in Swede we used to have an awesome system of plastic containers for a about 20 or so glass bottles of soda. These were always recycled (and so much cheaper than PET for some reason!), and it was obvious due to the wear on the glass bottles. Literally nobody cared about it. Google for "drickaback" to see how it looked like.

I did qualify that with "may," not "always."

Do you have a sense for what the collection and reprocessing costs were for the reused glass containers where you are?

I suspect that the warehousing and distribution systems we use in the US complicate collection of empty containers, i.e. there are several warehousing and stocking steps between the manufacturer and the retailer.

If you have a product made locally and distributed in a van, it's no problem to collect the empties. If you supply a distributor who supplies a supermarket chain that warehouses product regionally... It's a lot of steps for the bottle to get back to the manufacturer for reuse.

> Consumers also may feel weird ...

Any change requires doing things that people are unfamiliar with. Most of human history - 99.9..% of it - didn't have single-use disposable packaging, and did heavily reuse 'packaging' (containers).

Bio-degradables are one way. Some companies are spearheading this, but investment doesn't appear very high. GDNP.V in Canada.

I think a multi-pronged approach that includes but is not limited to reduction will be necessary.

If I saw more packaging like this in my local stores, even if slightly more expensive, I'd pick it up every time. I think the overall friction is more in the return process, and that's where the space for innovation really lies.

Or let people refill their bottles at the shop/mall like from a beer keg. But it probably would be a hassle to deal with for the seller, so it won't probably won't happen.

I get a significant chunk of my food here in Canada from Bulk Barn - where you can go and refill your containers with what you want. Besides grains, dry fruits and spices, I also get peanut and almond butter from there. The peanut butter is made right there with a nut butter machine - so you can be sure there are no additives or ultra-processing.

If these guys also started selling sauces like ketchup or mustard etc, where I could fill my bottle with them, I would absolutely get it from there. I guess most sauces can't be made on site, but its still a net win for the shop to get a bulk keg for them and customers to refill their bottles.

Americans revolt at reusable shopping bags which are leaps better than disposable ones. They just have to be stored and carried to the store. Resuable bags don't need the rotten ketchup cleaned out before the next use. You don't need a hundred different proprietary styles of resuable bags for every brand and type of contents.

Could just have bulk dispensers available at a lower price and people pay by the oz or whatever.

I don't think deposits or a meaningful motivation for return in the US. More of a grift or sin tax than anything else.

I wonder if even 1% of the charge is paid out to consumers

They worked pretty well when I lived in MI (although non-deposit containers would still become litter). Now I live in TN, with no deposit, and cans definitely get recycled less, even in relatively liberal parts of Nashville.

https://www.infographicsarchive.com/which-states-recycling-t... (which in turn cites https://www.ball.com/sustainability/real-circularity/50-stat... ) seems to show deposits correlating with better recycling rates. MI got a poor score overall, but in cans it's on top.

89% of deposit bottles are returned and recycled in Michigan

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