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by TeMPOraL 3919 days ago
I don't like it. Personally, I'm of the opinion that all beverages should be basically sold in three sizes: a small refillable "I'm in a hurry" travel size (say, 0.5 - 1L), a standard refillable daily-use container (say, 2 - 2.5L) and a refillable family container (say, 5L). Additionally, there should be an option to refill your bottle. It could be even metered by 1ml or something. The pre-bottled versions should be adequately more expensive - taxed with a recycling fee, and then taxed again with a "we know you ain't gonna recycle anyway" pollution fee.

I think pretty much every kind of food stuff that you buy regularly - things like ketchup, or oil, or spices, or pickles, etc. - should be available this way.

Because if you step outside your daily routine and look at the shopping experience, you'll see that it's absolutely ridiculous how much packaging you buy and throw away all the time, week after week. If you know that you're using, say, a 500ml of ketchup every week, you should be able to get a 2L bottle and refill it once a month instead of having to buy and throw away 6 bottles a month like you do today. Now take that and multiply it by all the other things you use like this - sauces, sodas, etc., then multiply by the first-world population (say, ~1B) and divide by average family size (say, 3), and you'll get billions of bottles going straight to landfill every month. This is just wrong.

The absolutely worst offenders are catering companies, who far too often think: "hey, we don't know exactly how much people will want to drink, so let's go for the least common value and buy a hundred thousand 0.5L bottles". Or the standard catering/hotel stacking mug size which ensures your guests will waste a lot of bagged tea trying to quench their thirst.

The second worst is bottled water. Especially in big cities, where municipal water is often cleaner than the supermarket one, buying bottled water is pure insanity - and yet people keep doing it all the time.

2 comments

I'm with you on this one. As a diver, seeing all this fing garbage in the sea makes me angrysad. I have had some success telling my friends about this problem (don't be too annoying with it) but I think the real solution is a plastic replacement such as the one made from shrimp shells or something.
In the 1990s there was a company with machines that provided refillable soda bottles at local supermarkets, but for whatever reason they disappeared.