Green Bottle has created a new way to look at recycling. They recently released a bottle that recycles in a matter of weeks. A majority of our bottles for juice, oj, milk and soda are largely not biodegradable. They're made from oil and take upwards of 500 years to decompose. Green Bottle on the other hand consumes about a third of the energy required to make a plastic bottle and has a Carbon Footprint that is 48% lower than plastic.Now don't get me wrong, this is a great idea and a step in the right direction but it's not enough of a disruption. Why don't grocery stores provide the option to refill bottles.? Instead of creating a bottle that takes less time to decompose, why not just innovate a way to keep the bottle out of the dump all together?
3 comments:
I love this. Some local grocery stores in RVA started selling gallons of milk for $4 and then you get $2 back when you bring the glass bottles back to be cleaned and reused. I loved it.
My dad and I were talking about this same refilling idea in a different context a few months back:
http://clairedalton.blogspot.com/2008/08/few-additional-environment-thoughts.html
Yeah, it's such a throw back to bring our own bottles in to get refilled. Our parents did it back in the day with their glass milk bottles, why don't we do it anymore? Or how about Rainbow Grocery, I like how they have food in large containers and then you fill a bag with what you need; forget all the fancy, expensive and wasteful packaging. We need to take this concept mainstream. As far as the receipts go, apple has it right and this works great for electronics. Grocery stores are the outlier however. In fact I always request a receipt and probably save $5 every other week by finding items the cashier rang up twice.
Strauss milk in Marin has a bottle reuse system. Once you've finished with the product, you clean out the bottle and return it to the grocery store for a rebate. Strauss then comes and picks the bottle up. Their bottles are great. They are thick and sturdy just like the milk bottles of yore when everything was delivered by a milk man. The real problem, though is a cultural one. It takes some effort to remember to bring your milk bottle to the store with you, and if you are on foot and doing a lot of errands, then you have to lug a big milk bottle with you the whole time.
I read in Freakanomics about a grocery store in rural France where in order to promote people to bring their own bags, the consumer would have to purchase the plastic ones, at a premium, and they would ring them up on a separate receipt. Everybody in this community had similar time habits, so the grocery store would usually be pretty packed, and people would get annoyed at the lummox who forgot his bags and took an extra two minutes checking out. Perhaps a similar system could be put in place for stuff like milk, where we have to purchase a certified milk container for $10, then the milk would cost $2 or something and they wouldn't sell you milk unless you had the certified container. The idea is to fuck with the economics of packaging and manufacture an economic incentive to spend the time and do the right thing.
But, I mean why do we drink milk in the first place? Its health benefits are nebulous at best... if you want calcium eat some spinach.
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