This is very interesting, but I can’t help but feel that a glass bottle with a metal cap (and one of those Dutch condiment spatulas) would be just fine for all these applications and also be more easily and effectively reused and recycled.
I re-use jam jars for food storage, drinking glasses, mini herb gardens, etc. and could incorporate bottles, jars, and other glass containers into a variety of needs around the house if they were designed with second and third lives in mind.
Add in health effects of microplastics/chemical leaching and glass is again a winner.
Transportation costs and breakage are perhaps higher, but maybe that’s a cost we should accept?
> Transportation costs and breakage are perhaps higher, but maybe that’s a cost we should accept?
I suspect that transportation and breakage costs are higher only because we don't account for externalities when considering plastic: in other words producers don't sustain the full costs and are effectively subsidized by the society at large and the environment (through increased healthcare spending, lower QOL, higher obesity rates, lower fertility, and other environmental costs that will be sustained by future generations).
Glass has externalities as well. If all transportation weight is significantly higher that is going to have a large impact on global warming until we switch to clean transportation which to be frank is a long ways off if we are being honest.
They're not specifically intended for condiments (most jam jars are low and wide enough that they can be scraped with a spoon), but for storing more viscous liquids in larger glass (milk) bottles, like yoghurt or vla.
You know? Maybe a few dozen standard sized and broad/wide necked tops made out of laboratory grade glass would do. That stuff is almost indestructible and does not leach or take on anything in the concentrations used for food/drink stuff. Not even tea or coffee stains! So there is the question of the returns. Why returning
when you could have a refill machine in store which could clean them fast in safe ways before refilling? For anything more than a few bottles, use reusable kegs and plug them into an appliance at home? Or those watercooler canisters? I recently saw milk in a plastic bag again, like it has been about 40 years ago?
Interestingly that bag wasn't sloppy or wobbly at all, because on one side it had a handle, which felt like it was inflated with something, which made it stiff. Still one time use only, though less material.
For reference, this is what we do with beer bottles in Germany. There’s two standard bottle types which you can return to shops, which take any brand, as long as it’s the standard type. They return them to a cleaning facility which distributes them back to the breweries (extremely simplified, there’s lots of details like a mandatory deposit on reusable bottles consumers pay to incentivise returning them to stores).
But basically, bottles get reused as long as they’re usable. It works quite well!
That sound you heard was me rolling my eyes at the bunch of nonsense they started off with, which seemed sucked straight from the mouth of a plastics industry PR lackey. The squeeze nipple thingy is pretty brilliant, but an ecological disaster.
As a cook I find the squeeze actually sort of frustrating. Sometimes it usefully delivers the right amount of ketchup (or mustard, or whatever) to its destination; mostly it splatters. In any case I still have to use a knife to spread it around.
Solving the leaky bottle upside down problem is too narrow a focus.
I remember when ketchup came in glass bottles and you had to use a knife to get it out. I'm much happier with the squeeze bottle era. I like reusability, but I also like things not being a pain to use.
I just wanted to chime in with a tip for people who are struggling to get every last drop of tasty condiments out of containers. There are tiny rubber condiment spatulas designed to aid you in your quest for total condiment use. They are also useful for skin care products, but I wouldn't suggest using the same ones for both applications.
There's a book from 25+ years ago on the design of cardboard boxes which goes to similar levels of obsessive detail. Part Art college, design school, industrial design and part coffee table book.
Cardboard, it's origami for industry: sheet form, now optimise assembly, cost and structural integrity alongside ease of production...
When I was in high school, we had a hands-on project in geometry for making nets, which is the name of the geometrical outline of a box when disassembled and laid flat [0]. I remember my teacher saying that if you wanted to make it big with geometry, you should go into the business of making nets for retail companies. All these years later I can see the wisdom.
If any of them date from the 1970s, they're good candidates. Didn't recognize the covers but there's often more than one edition of a book. Nice find! they look to be in the same class, possibly even better!
I wish I could remember. My mum used to bring these things home from the art college library on long loan. It was by an industry professional, on the processes to design efficient boxes, packing, cardboard constructions. I can't find it online.
It's incredible that we designed a material for robustness that takes hundreds of years to break down, and it is the default material for designing single use everyday items, and then rely on all the efforts of an ineffective recycling program to maybe get a couple more uses out of it.
It's not really "incredible" when you consider that material properties like "robustness" and "years to break down" aren't sliders you can adjust willy nilly. It just turns out stuff that can break down, break down really fast (eg. cardboard), and the ones that can last at least a year or two, last for centuries.
The material you’re taking about, plastic, is made from carbon stored inside of the Earth. If we can reliably get it back in the Earth, e.g. via landfill, then I don’t see a huge issue with it. Also, wood was a forever material prior to the evolution of white rot.
Human manufactured Wooden objects are not found in remote places on earth. Tiny specs of wood are definitely not found in bodies/blood of humans including infants.
Single use wooden items don’t cause flooding and damage wildlife.
These are not the same. They don’t have the same problems.
To be blunt your argument for polluting our environment doesn't feel like it's in good faith when you blame wood for being a pollutant until a fungus showed up hundreds of millions of years ago. I absolutely loathe the term "whataboutism" but this seems like a real example - "what about the fact that wood was a pollutant hundreds of millions of years ago? We should be able to dump plastic now".
Heinz Ketchup Cap: may have solved the problem of storing the bottle upside down, but it doesn't solve the problem of 3% of the product remaining in the container and being almost impossible to retrieve.
Sriracha Bottle Cap: it's a fun design, but in my experience it tends to turn filthy, sticky and basically break. Kind of terrible, really.
Vita Coco Bottle Cap: okay if it works, very annoying if it doesn't. The whole container is a recycling nightmare, fwiw.
The main packaging issue is the single-use target. In the past we have had a concept and an industry about recycling packages in various ways but to "simply" and "make things more efficient so profitable" we decide that a single-use solution is better.
That's was true in an age of raw material abundance where a light and disposable package means less transportation cost, simple infrastructures, less distributed human labor requirements etc. You can pack milk in a factory and directly ship it to stores where the only need is putting them on some supermarket shelf. In the past there is a need for glass bottles who are fragile and heavyweight, they need to be cleaned up, there is an industry to wash/recycle them, many stages in line etc...
The result of modern food packaging is that we are able to concentrate stuff, few big factories in exotic places, more products on shelves, cheaper product. However now we start seeing that such efficient move is not sustainable... I bet in the future we will came back somewhat, and such move will hurt MUCH...
While this is technology is beautiful, I think it would be easier to visualize how these products work by looking at old-fashioned still pictures of their disassembled parts.
And yet, I wish none of my packages had these, and would let me cut a corner off or stick to simple caps. I must have underdeveloped motor skills, but if there is one guaranteed thing to happen is that ketchup sprays everywhere, dosage caps get clogged and dry out, caps are placed such that I can't get all contents out, etc. etc.
For me, none of them work. And they often seem like an expensive component.
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I re-use jam jars for food storage, drinking glasses, mini herb gardens, etc. and could incorporate bottles, jars, and other glass containers into a variety of needs around the house if they were designed with second and third lives in mind.
Add in health effects of microplastics/chemical leaching and glass is again a winner.
Transportation costs and breakage are perhaps higher, but maybe that’s a cost we should accept?
I suspect that transportation and breakage costs are higher only because we don't account for externalities when considering plastic: in other words producers don't sustain the full costs and are effectively subsidized by the society at large and the environment (through increased healthcare spending, lower QOL, higher obesity rates, lower fertility, and other environmental costs that will be sustained by future generations).
There are externalities with glass too (think shattered bottles in public spaces) but my feeling is they’re fewer and less earth-destroying.
For reference, I assume you mean a bottle scraper here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottle_scraper
They're not specifically intended for condiments (most jam jars are low and wide enough that they can be scraped with a spoon), but for storing more viscous liquids in larger glass (milk) bottles, like yoghurt or vla.
Interestingly that bag wasn't sloppy or wobbly at all, because on one side it had a handle, which felt like it was inflated with something, which made it stiff. Still one time use only, though less material.
Standardized glass containers would be useful, although in some ways already exist (mason jars usually accept common lids, for instance).
What we need is a shift in mentality away from a plastic-first approach.
“I’ve got one word for you kid: glass.”
Solving the leaky bottle upside down problem is too narrow a focus.
Cardboard, it's origami for industry: sheet form, now optimise assembly, cost and structural integrity alongside ease of production...
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_(polyhedron)
"The Package Design Book", "Structural Package Design" and "Complex Packaging" via https://mobile.twitter.com/robin7331/status/1484442902050881...
Single use wooden items don’t cause flooding and damage wildlife.
These are not the same. They don’t have the same problems.
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Sriracha Bottle Cap: it's a fun design, but in my experience it tends to turn filthy, sticky and basically break. Kind of terrible, really.
Vita Coco Bottle Cap: okay if it works, very annoying if it doesn't. The whole container is a recycling nightmare, fwiw.
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That's was true in an age of raw material abundance where a light and disposable package means less transportation cost, simple infrastructures, less distributed human labor requirements etc. You can pack milk in a factory and directly ship it to stores where the only need is putting them on some supermarket shelf. In the past there is a need for glass bottles who are fragile and heavyweight, they need to be cleaned up, there is an industry to wash/recycle them, many stages in line etc...
The result of modern food packaging is that we are able to concentrate stuff, few big factories in exotic places, more products on shelves, cheaper product. However now we start seeing that such efficient move is not sustainable... I bet in the future we will came back somewhat, and such move will hurt MUCH...
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For me, none of them work. And they often seem like an expensive component.