4 ms·
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 filli
by 0_____0 3y ago
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.
- sandos 3y agoConsumers _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.
- 0_____0 3y agoI 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.
- wolverine876 3y ago> 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).