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This is such a big part of it and it's amazing that they get away with it. Case in point: Blue Apron. Blue Apron positioned itself as one of the more "recycle-

This is such a big part of it and it's amazing that they get away with it. Case in point: Blue Apron. Blue Apron positioned itself as one of the more "recycle-friendly" food delivery services to try and fight the stigma against every delivery having bags upon bags of individually wrapped goods by providing recycling services. As a former Blue Apron customer, I loved that I could separate stuff out (hard plastic, soft plastic, paper, etc.) and throw away anything that touched raw meat and just send it back to them in the same cardboard box I received it in. Blue Apron then cancelled their recycling services and now just redirects people to do it themselves because "recycling is hard". Now, the number of people that will actually recycle will drop further and Blue Apron doesn't have to change its operations one iota. I cancelled my subscription as soon as they removed the recycling options because they wanted to put the blame on the end user instead of themselves for producing all that waste in the first place. There is a solution here. Until it's financially incentivized for them to find it, though, we'll be stuck here creating more and more waste.

dreamcompiler 8y ago
Blue Apron's cold packs are ridiculous. The goop leaks onto the food, they're a nightmare to dispose of, and they're heavy; probably 75% of the weight of a BA box is the cold packs. If they used dry ice, the boxes would be much lighter weight -- saving on shipping costs -- and they would simply evaporate rather than needing to be trashed.
- ars 8y ago
  The CO2 would enter the food, and make it taste like a weird kind of seltzer. Is all the food air sealed?
  - bunderbunder 8y ago
    CO2 doesn't really go into anything to any significant degree unless it's under pressure.
    - ars 8y ago
      And yet it did when I had food cooled by dry ice. So what counts more, what actually happened, or the theory? The reason is that if the item is cold (especially right above freezing) you don't need much pressure to get CO2 to dissolve. The food was weird it was all tingly and fizzy on the tongue. Kind of like the flavor of flat seltzer.
      - mrob 8y ago
        Solubility of CO2 in water at 0C and roughly atmospheric pressure is about 0.001337 mole fraction [0]. CO2 molecules are 44/18 times heavier than water molecules, so that's about 3.3g of CO2 dissolved in a liter of water. Carbonated water is usually specified in "volumes of CO2". One mole of gas at STP has a volume of about 22.4L, so one liter of CO2 weighs about 2g. "Lightly carbonated" is usually considered about two volumes of dissolved CO2, so 4g/L, which isn't much higher than 3.3g. Assuming the packaging is sealed well enough to maintain a high percentage of CO2 within, and the temperature is low enough, it looks plausible that there would be a noticeable change in taste/mouth-feel. This is confirmed by a study I found showing average taste threshold for dissolved CO2 in water of 0.26g/L [1]. [0] http://sites.chem.colostate.edu/diverdi/all_courses/CRC%20reference%20data/solubility%20of%20carbon%20dioxide%20in%20water.pdf http://sites.chem.colostate.edu/diverdi/all_courses/CRC%20re... [1] https://home.zhaw.ch/yere/pdf/Teil16%20-%20Expression%20of%20Multidisciplinary.pdf https://home.zhaw.ch/yere/pdf/Teil16%20-%20Expression%20of%2... The theory supports ars. Calculate before you downvote.
    - mrob 8y ago
      One exception: fermenting liquids can become super-saturated with CO2 even if fitted with an air-lock to vent the CO2 to atmospheric pressure. This might cause a rather messy surprise if you add powdered yeast nutrient to an ongoing fermentation and give it a lot of nucleation points.
  - pininja 8y ago
    I’ve experienced this issue just a tiny bit with my delivery of dip’n’dots with dry ice, but more noticeably when putting dry ice in a cocktail. It is really noticeable in drinks with direct exposure to all that gas and ice. Solid food in a box? I don’t have as much experience with that, so I’m not sure.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  It might not be feasible for them. Shippers place pretty strict limits on how much dry ice can go onto one of their planes, on account of not wanting to suffocate the air crew mid flight.
  - WalterBright 8y ago
    Fortunately, people have built-in biological CO2 detectors. If it is just flight crew (no passengers), they all have oxygen masks they can use if the CO2 suffuses the cabin.
    - victorhooi 8y ago
      Umm, surely you can see that's a little crazy? I'm all for environmental awareness - but it's a bit like the people saying, oh, why do you not use re-usable containers for everything, or do you really need to dishwash everything? Things like food safety, and not making your customers sick are enshrined in law - and that's a good thing. Even at my work, they aren't allowed to re-serve/re-heat things that have been served once, due to cross-contamination.
      - quantum_magpie 8y ago
        >[...]do you really need to dishwash everything? You don't! Unless you have flies and cockroaches infested kitchen, some stray bacteria left after just water-washing will be much less harmful than eating the stuck-on-surface dishsoap (which does not rinse off completely, since it's hydrophobic). I have an even worse opinion of people constantly bleaching their countertops. shudder As an anecdote, I once had a misfortune of living with a guy who would never rinse off the dishsoap from the dishes at all, just leave them out to dry still covered in suds!
        lemonghost 8y ago
        Soaps and detergents are not hydrophobic. They are part hydrophilic and part lipophilic which is how they pull lipids into the water when you wash something.
foobarian 8y ago
I was just fuming at the heavy coolant bags they ship in their packages that are not recyclable and recommended to be thrown in the trash. This is not progress.
dahart 8y ago
I quite liked the convenience and food and recipes, but my nagging guilt over the packaging waste and transportation waste of individually packaged and shipped food, even when recycling, is the reason I stopped taking Blue Apron. Shipping the recycling back to them didn't seem like a net positive either. But at least they tried! I feel bad picking on Blue Apron when single using plastic water bottles are everywhere.
- inapis 8y ago
  Don't get trapped in the fallacy of what-about-ism. Just because plastic bottles are a nuisance already present everywhere doesn't give other entities a license to produce more trash.
bunderbunder 8y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if "Pack the box back up and burn a bunch more jet fuel sending it back to New York" turns out to be even worse than just sending it all to the landfill. Given that they require air mailing boxes full of (mostly, by weight) frozen liquids all over the place on a weekly basis, I'm not convinced that these meal kit services can ever be made sustainable. Compared to that cost, worrying about recycling and whether their food suppliers are organic or not seems like it's probably just bikeshedding. It might be cool to see what a company like Imperfect Produce could come up with in this space.
- king_nothing 8y ago
  Local micro JIT mass-production and local recycling. In fact, make containers and packaging more reusable akin to the old glass seltzer water bottles that don’t have to be melted down and remade for every use.
- weberc2 8y ago
  Certainly they could be at least as sustainable as any grocery store; they’d just need to create more, smaller distribution centers closer to their customers. The DCs can get their supplies locally or via bulk shipments (and sort out recycling on-site) and then assemble the meal kits and add ice for the last mile. Transporting ingredients in bulk to the DCs is more efficient than transporting a bunch of individually packaged and individually cooked meal kits.
- 60secz 8y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised to see local distribution through grocery stores (whole foods/ralphs) dominate the subscription meal space over the next few years due to better distribution margins and economies of scale.
  - kalleboo 8y ago
    This is how it works where I lived in Europe. All the big grocery store chains have their own food subscription boxes, and instead of having it delivered home you can also just pick it up at your local supermarket on you way home from work.
azernik 8y ago
Doesn't address the bigger issue, but Sun Basket is for now a relatively environmentally-friendly one - a relatively small amount of paper/cardboard packaging only.
xahrepap 8y ago
We tried a local alternative to Blue Apron. They hand delivered to our doorstep. It was pretty well done and organized. Packaging didn't seem particularly wasteful to me. Might be worth checking around to see if anyone local is more friendly that way.
- r00fus 8y ago
  Who did you end up using?
  - xahrepap 8y ago
    Not sure of the name. Some mom-and-pop startup in Utah County. My wife saw a coupon or ad for them and decided to try it out.
- nhoth34ntoein 8y ago
  We did this as well. They would drop off essentially a gym bag full of food and ice packs on week one. Starting on week 2, you leave the bag, ice packs, and rinsed containers on your porch and they pick it up as they drop off the next batch. It worked great! They eventually shut down the food part of their business to sell their food business software to other businesses, so we started using Sun Basket. Everything they send is locally recyclable, though I wonder how many people do it. I'm thinking of canceling because they've started including ads for unrelated stuff in their shipments. (This week some meal was "sponsored by" some stupid movie that comes out next week. Ugh.) Other than that, I've been fairly happy with their work.
insaneirish 8y ago
> There is a solution here. Rant: the solution is to learn how to read a recipe and cook without a paint by numbers erector set that has an unreasonable packaging:food ratio. I’m fine with these services as a ‘gateway drug’ to independently cooking for yourself, but they’re insane as a long term thing. (Not to mention that I have no idea how they stay viable in the long term, given their customer acquisition costs. If anyone makes it work in the long term it will be Amazon/Whole Foods.)
- dpkonofa 8y ago
  That's nonsense. I have formal culinary training and Blue Apron was never about needing to learn how to read a recipe and cook with "a paint by numbers erector set". It was almost exclusively about the convenience and ease of recycling what was sent. You're projecting.
  - arbitrary_name 8y ago
    No,i agree with parent. What is so damn hard about picking a recipe and then ordering produce/goods from your local grocery accordingly? It seems wasteful to use a service like that purely for convenience.
    - sp332 8y ago
      It's much less wasteful to have many meals made up at once than for everyone to invent ad hoc meals. Also you just get enough of each ingredient for the meal instead of having to buy whatever unit size the grocery store feels like selling.
    - dpkonofa 8y ago
      Great. That's your prerogative. With Blue Apron, I didn't have to leave the house so it was incredibly convenient, the food was good, the variety of recipes was good, and I got to cook with ingredients that I never would have picked out on my own or that just aren't available at my local grocery store. Convenience is the major factor but there are all kinds of pros to the Blue Apron service that I would continue to benefit from if it wasn't just for the incredibly wasteful packaging and processing. If they just shipped all that stuff without all the wrapping, I'd be fine with that. I've done farm boxes before that didn't need all the plastic.
tgb 8y ago
This is what Blue Apron recommends for "recycling" their freezer packs: "We recommend cutting the ice pack open and disposing of the gel in the trash. You can then recycle on your own or send back to us!" [1] Yes, you take the stuff out of the freezer pack bag and put it into a new bag, and recycle the old bag. Where does the new bag go? In the trash. [1] https://twitter.com/blueapron/status/652141163948847104?lang=en https://twitter.com/blueapron/status/652141163948847104?lang...
- ddoolin 8y ago
  This exact same thing happened with Amazon Fresh. Used to have a way to return ice packs, now you cannot. The instructions are the same: cut the pack, drain gel, recycle?
  - dabockster 8y ago
    In Seattle, Amazon Fresh was using dry ice for a while. My friends and I would just cut up the block of dry ice and use it to smoke our cocktails.
nyxtom 8y ago
It is amazing how often humans continue to essentially create new problems that are easily solvable on their own. A culture of convenience and throw-away (not my problem) or "I don't have the time for x" is why we keep having mountains of waste. Anyone who is concerned with waste can make the conscious choices to eliminate or reduce that waste in a lot of areas of their life. 1. Buy real food and cook it 2. Grow food or contribute to local co-op or farms 3. Make stuff you use all the time 4. Bring your own containers/bags Usually these are the only options for a lot of things. But there are other cases where just having consumers fed up with companies like in the case above you can shift market incentives with your choice. Lush is a good example of this for instance. It's a combined effort, you have to not be lazy and actually care about the choices you are making with where you spend your money and companies will respond to the demand. Sometimes it takes more effort, or you can just not buy X and see if you can either make your own alternative or not need X at all. There are tons and tons of homemade things you can do to eliminate waste by just making it yourself. I've found it generally comes to a few constant categories where I generally produce the most waste. - Food + Beverages - Hygenics Sure there are the other areas where I produce trash, but those two categories are the ones where waste is produced every single day so the impact is a lot higher. The solution is relatively straightforward, make more things by hand or purchase goods closer to raw form (Lush seems to be a great example of one that can replace just about all of my hygenic material waste). And second, make more recipes by hand closer to the raw material ingredients and bring your own containers.
- maccard 8y ago
  > Buy real food and cook it > Bring your own containers/bags I eat out once a fortnight for dinner and once a week for lunch, and cook the rest of the time. The vast majority of what I buy is fresh food (fruit, vegetables, some small amounts of dairy, meat and pulses). Everything I buy is packaged in single use plastics. My lunch today, the tomatoes came in a cardboard box that was wrapped in plastic, the cucumber was shrink wrapped, the pitta breads came individually wrapped. There are two supermarkets I can choose from and both of them suffer the same problem. All the meat comes in disposable trays with a film covering, and a plastic inlet. Technically the tray is recyclable if I remove the meat and the inside tray and wash it, but my recycling services won't accept it in case it's contaminated by food. My plastic toothpaste container comes in a cardboard box. My biodegradable bin liners come with a plastic wrapper to protect them. This isn't something that I can fix, I don't have the option to buy unpackaged goods, or to provide my own containers.

dreamcompiler 8y ago

Blue Apron's cold packs are ridiculous. The goop leaks onto the food, they're a nightmare to dispose of, and they're heavy; probably 75% of the weight of a BA box is the cold packs. If they used dry ice, the boxes would be much lighter weight -- saving on shipping costs -- and they would simply evaporate rather than needing to be trashed.

ars 8y ago
The CO2 would enter the food, and make it taste like a weird kind of seltzer. Is all the food air sealed?
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  CO2 doesn't really go into anything to any significant degree unless it's under pressure.
  - ars 8y ago
    And yet it did when I had food cooled by dry ice. So what counts more, what actually happened, or the theory? The reason is that if the item is cold (especially right above freezing) you don't need much pressure to get CO2 to dissolve. The food was weird it was all tingly and fizzy on the tongue. Kind of like the flavor of flat seltzer.
    - mrob 8y ago
      Solubility of CO2 in water at 0C and roughly atmospheric pressure is about 0.001337 mole fraction [0]. CO2 molecules are 44/18 times heavier than water molecules, so that's about 3.3g of CO2 dissolved in a liter of water. Carbonated water is usually specified in "volumes of CO2". One mole of gas at STP has a volume of about 22.4L, so one liter of CO2 weighs about 2g. "Lightly carbonated" is usually considered about two volumes of dissolved CO2, so 4g/L, which isn't much higher than 3.3g. Assuming the packaging is sealed well enough to maintain a high percentage of CO2 within, and the temperature is low enough, it looks plausible that there would be a noticeable change in taste/mouth-feel. This is confirmed by a study I found showing average taste threshold for dissolved CO2 in water of 0.26g/L [1]. [0] http://sites.chem.colostate.edu/diverdi/all_courses/CRC%20reference%20data/solubility%20of%20carbon%20dioxide%20in%20water.pdf http://sites.chem.colostate.edu/diverdi/all_courses/CRC%20re... [1] https://home.zhaw.ch/yere/pdf/Teil16%20-%20Expression%20of%20Multidisciplinary.pdf https://home.zhaw.ch/yere/pdf/Teil16%20-%20Expression%20of%2... The theory supports ars. Calculate before you downvote.
  - mrob 8y ago
    One exception: fermenting liquids can become super-saturated with CO2 even if fitted with an air-lock to vent the CO2 to atmospheric pressure. This might cause a rather messy surprise if you add powdered yeast nutrient to an ongoing fermentation and give it a lot of nucleation points.
- pininja 8y ago
  I’ve experienced this issue just a tiny bit with my delivery of dip’n’dots with dry ice, but more noticeably when putting dry ice in a cocktail. It is really noticeable in drinks with direct exposure to all that gas and ice. Solid food in a box? I don’t have as much experience with that, so I’m not sure.
bunderbunder 8y ago
It might not be feasible for them. Shippers place pretty strict limits on how much dry ice can go onto one of their planes, on account of not wanting to suffocate the air crew mid flight.
- WalterBright 8y ago
  Fortunately, people have built-in biological CO2 detectors. If it is just flight crew (no passengers), they all have oxygen masks they can use if the CO2 suffuses the cabin.
  - victorhooi 8y ago
    Umm, surely you can see that's a little crazy? I'm all for environmental awareness - but it's a bit like the people saying, oh, why do you not use re-usable containers for everything, or do you really need to dishwash everything? Things like food safety, and not making your customers sick are enshrined in law - and that's a good thing. Even at my work, they aren't allowed to re-serve/re-heat things that have been served once, due to cross-contamination.
    - quantum_magpie 8y ago
      >[...]do you really need to dishwash everything? You don't! Unless you have flies and cockroaches infested kitchen, some stray bacteria left after just water-washing will be much less harmful than eating the stuck-on-surface dishsoap (which does not rinse off completely, since it's hydrophobic). I have an even worse opinion of people constantly bleaching their countertops. shudder As an anecdote, I once had a misfortune of living with a guy who would never rinse off the dishsoap from the dishes at all, just leave them out to dry still covered in suds!
      - lemonghost 8y ago
        Soaps and detergents are not hydrophobic. They are part hydrophilic and part lipophilic which is how they pull lipids into the water when you wash something.

foobarian 8y ago

I was just fuming at the heavy coolant bags they ship in their packages that are not recyclable and recommended to be thrown in the trash. This is not progress.

dahart 8y ago

I quite liked the convenience and food and recipes, but my nagging guilt over the packaging waste and transportation waste of individually packaged and shipped food, even when recycling, is the reason I stopped taking Blue Apron. Shipping the recycling back to them didn't seem like a net positive either. But at least they tried! I feel bad picking on Blue Apron when single using plastic water bottles are everywhere.

inapis 8y ago
Don't get trapped in the fallacy of what-about-ism. Just because plastic bottles are a nuisance already present everywhere doesn't give other entities a license to produce more trash.

bunderbunder 8y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if "Pack the box back up and burn a bunch more jet fuel sending it back to New York" turns out to be even worse than just sending it all to the landfill. Given that they require air mailing boxes full of (mostly, by weight) frozen liquids all over the place on a weekly basis, I'm not convinced that these meal kit services can ever be made sustainable. Compared to that cost, worrying about recycling and whether their food suppliers are organic or not seems like it's probably just bikeshedding. It might be cool to see what a company like Imperfect Produce could come up with in this space.

king_nothing 8y ago
Local micro JIT mass-production and local recycling. In fact, make containers and packaging more reusable akin to the old glass seltzer water bottles that don’t have to be melted down and remade for every use.
weberc2 8y ago
Certainly they could be at least as sustainable as any grocery store; they’d just need to create more, smaller distribution centers closer to their customers. The DCs can get their supplies locally or via bulk shipments (and sort out recycling on-site) and then assemble the meal kits and add ice for the last mile. Transporting ingredients in bulk to the DCs is more efficient than transporting a bunch of individually packaged and individually cooked meal kits.
60secz 8y ago
I wouldn't be surprised to see local distribution through grocery stores (whole foods/ralphs) dominate the subscription meal space over the next few years due to better distribution margins and economies of scale.
- kalleboo 8y ago
  This is how it works where I lived in Europe. All the big grocery store chains have their own food subscription boxes, and instead of having it delivered home you can also just pick it up at your local supermarket on you way home from work.

azernik 8y ago

Doesn't address the bigger issue, but Sun Basket is for now a relatively environmentally-friendly one - a relatively small amount of paper/cardboard packaging only.

xahrepap 8y ago

We tried a local alternative to Blue Apron. They hand delivered to our doorstep. It was pretty well done and organized. Packaging didn't seem particularly wasteful to me. Might be worth checking around to see if anyone local is more friendly that way.

r00fus 8y ago
Who did you end up using?
- xahrepap 8y ago
  Not sure of the name. Some mom-and-pop startup in Utah County. My wife saw a coupon or ad for them and decided to try it out.
nhoth34ntoein 8y ago
We did this as well. They would drop off essentially a gym bag full of food and ice packs on week one. Starting on week 2, you leave the bag, ice packs, and rinsed containers on your porch and they pick it up as they drop off the next batch. It worked great! They eventually shut down the food part of their business to sell their food business software to other businesses, so we started using Sun Basket. Everything they send is locally recyclable, though I wonder how many people do it. I'm thinking of canceling because they've started including ads for unrelated stuff in their shipments. (This week some meal was "sponsored by" some stupid movie that comes out next week. Ugh.) Other than that, I've been fairly happy with their work.

insaneirish 8y ago

> There is a solution here. Rant: the solution is to learn how to read a recipe and cook without a paint by numbers erector set that has an unreasonable packaging:food ratio. I’m fine with these services as a ‘gateway drug’ to independently cooking for yourself, but they’re insane as a long term thing. (Not to mention that I have no idea how they stay viable in the long term, given their customer acquisition costs. If anyone makes it work in the long term it will be Amazon/Whole Foods.)

dpkonofa 8y ago
That's nonsense. I have formal culinary training and Blue Apron was never about needing to learn how to read a recipe and cook with "a paint by numbers erector set". It was almost exclusively about the convenience and ease of recycling what was sent. You're projecting.
- arbitrary_name 8y ago
  No,i agree with parent. What is so damn hard about picking a recipe and then ordering produce/goods from your local grocery accordingly? It seems wasteful to use a service like that purely for convenience.
  - sp332 8y ago
    It's much less wasteful to have many meals made up at once than for everyone to invent ad hoc meals. Also you just get enough of each ingredient for the meal instead of having to buy whatever unit size the grocery store feels like selling.
  - dpkonofa 8y ago
    Great. That's your prerogative. With Blue Apron, I didn't have to leave the house so it was incredibly convenient, the food was good, the variety of recipes was good, and I got to cook with ingredients that I never would have picked out on my own or that just aren't available at my local grocery store. Convenience is the major factor but there are all kinds of pros to the Blue Apron service that I would continue to benefit from if it wasn't just for the incredibly wasteful packaging and processing. If they just shipped all that stuff without all the wrapping, I'd be fine with that. I've done farm boxes before that didn't need all the plastic.

tgb 8y ago

This is what Blue Apron recommends for "recycling" their freezer packs: "We recommend cutting the ice pack open and disposing of the gel in the trash. You can then recycle on your own or send back to us!" [1] Yes, you take the stuff out of the freezer pack bag and put it into a new bag, and recycle the old bag. Where does the new bag go? In the trash. [1] https://twitter.com/blueapron/status/652141163948847104?lang=en https://twitter.com/blueapron/status/652141163948847104?lang...

ddoolin 8y ago
This exact same thing happened with Amazon Fresh. Used to have a way to return ice packs, now you cannot. The instructions are the same: cut the pack, drain gel, recycle?
- dabockster 8y ago
  In Seattle, Amazon Fresh was using dry ice for a while. My friends and I would just cut up the block of dry ice and use it to smoke our cocktails.

nyxtom 8y ago

It is amazing how often humans continue to essentially create new problems that are easily solvable on their own. A culture of convenience and throw-away (not my problem) or "I don't have the time for x" is why we keep having mountains of waste. Anyone who is concerned with waste can make the conscious choices to eliminate or reduce that waste in a lot of areas of their life. 1. Buy real food and cook it 2. Grow food or contribute to local co-op or farms 3. Make stuff you use all the time 4. Bring your own containers/bags Usually these are the only options for a lot of things. But there are other cases where just having consumers fed up with companies like in the case above you can shift market incentives with your choice. Lush is a good example of this for instance. It's a combined effort, you have to not be lazy and actually care about the choices you are making with where you spend your money and companies will respond to the demand. Sometimes it takes more effort, or you can just not buy X and see if you can either make your own alternative or not need X at all. There are tons and tons of homemade things you can do to eliminate waste by just making it yourself. I've found it generally comes to a few constant categories where I generally produce the most waste. - Food + Beverages - Hygenics Sure there are the other areas where I produce trash, but those two categories are the ones where waste is produced every single day so the impact is a lot higher. The solution is relatively straightforward, make more things by hand or purchase goods closer to raw form (Lush seems to be a great example of one that can replace just about all of my hygenic material waste). And second, make more recipes by hand closer to the raw material ingredients and bring your own containers.

maccard 8y ago
> Buy real food and cook it > Bring your own containers/bags I eat out once a fortnight for dinner and once a week for lunch, and cook the rest of the time. The vast majority of what I buy is fresh food (fruit, vegetables, some small amounts of dairy, meat and pulses). Everything I buy is packaged in single use plastics. My lunch today, the tomatoes came in a cardboard box that was wrapped in plastic, the cucumber was shrink wrapped, the pitta breads came individually wrapped. There are two supermarkets I can choose from and both of them suffer the same problem. All the meat comes in disposable trays with a film covering, and a plastic inlet. Technically the tray is recyclable if I remove the meat and the inside tray and wash it, but my recycling services won't accept it in case it's contaminated by food. My plastic toothpaste container comes in a cardboard box. My biodegradable bin liners come with a plastic wrapper to protect them. This isn't something that I can fix, I don't have the option to buy unpackaged goods, or to provide my own containers.