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Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

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Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#211
post #122
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what percentage of after tax income people paid fir this? I'm curious how other compares to today's services.

Paid for the service? I grew up in Scotland, milk and meat came from the farms every morning (90s), you'd put your order in the old milk bottle with the money and they'd leave whatever your order was. I seem to recall it was 50p for most type of milk and 75p for creams. (Except the BSE years.. shudder ugh the BSE years.)

[Edit] Do you think that the Aphex Twin song Milkman makes reference to this lack of milk delivery during this period?

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease, is an incurable and invariably fatal neurodegenerative disease of cattle. . . . Spread to humans is believed to result in variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD). As of 2018, a total of 231 cases of vCJD had been reported globally.

BSE is thought to be due to an infection by a misfolded protein, known as a prion. Cattle are believed to have been infected by being fed meat-and-bone meal (MBM) that contained either the remains of cattle who spontaneously developed the disease or scrapie-infected sheep products. The outbreak increased throughout the United Kingdom due to the practice of feeding meat-and-bone meal to young calves of dairy cows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#212
post #4

Very nice. I live alone and often I'm baffled by the sheer amount of garbage that my urban lifestyle generates. I was not alive in the 80's but I was told that people used to use more environment-friendly packaging like glass bottles. Sometimes I wonder why this massive change to everything-should-be-packed-in-plastic happened.

There are concerns that breathing in and ingesting microplastics from clothing, car tires, and packaging is causing some of the health epidemics we see in the last decades. Like rising rates of obesity, cancer, mental disorders (autism, ADHD, gender dysphoria) and decreasing sperm count and quality. But no definitive evidence exists yet. If this turns out to be true, there is a case against plastic even if it is econ…

There are "concerns without definitive evidence" that everything causes everything. If this turns out to be true, there is a case against everything.

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its cheaper and easier to ensure sanitary products. We love to be romantic about glass but I don't think as easy of a calculation for the total environmental use. Glass is heavier and more expensive to transport. Glass is harder to shape into sizes that make for efficient transportation, for example Costco square milk jugs. I love to use glass when I can but I don't know if using this glass jar which may not even be…

You know what's more efficient than glass? Ship the product in bulk and dispense it into the customer's container. And a lot of products could actually be formulated on site, because most of, say, your cleaning aisle is various combinations of relatively few standard components. The biggest barrier there are certain people's desires to control information and to create the perception of distinctions that don't exist.

> You know what's more efficient than glass? Ship the product in bulk and dispense it into the customer's container.

yeah, that would be a great use of everyone's time. line up at the olive oil station, line up at the beer station, line up at the flour station, line up at the coffee station, line up at the ketchup station, ....

and then on top of that, add up the time and expense of everyone getting a different price based on how much their unique container holds.

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#214

Couldn't be worse than the old caps with the silicone-it's impossible to get a small squirt from those things. You've either got nothing, or you're swimming in ketchup.

I always popped out the silicone valve for that very reason. You would have to squeeze until the pressure overcame the resistance of the silicone valve then the ketchup would squirt out at high velocity. It was nearly impossible to get exactly the amount you wanted. With the valve removed it only takes a gentle squeeze.

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transport cost is one factor, but even in countries where glass bottles are sold alongside plastic ones they are unpopular to the end user themselves because of their inconvenience. The common 2kg×6 PET bottles format is too heavy for glass bottles, so you end up paying more for heavier 1.5kgx6 bottles that are going to last you less.

> because of their inconvenience IMO it's simply habits no one would buy beer or wine in a plastic bottle, because it feels wrong (and it is if you ask me). Here in Italy nobody in their right mind buys tomato sauce in plastic bottles, our granmas would come to haunt us at night if we did. but we buy water in plastic bottles ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Trying to make sense of the world is the surest way to go mad.

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#216

you know what could be sustainable? A bring-your-own bottle policy in stores. Deliver big dispensers to stores, and let people refill. All the rest is a very marginal reduction unlikely to have an effect in the long run. In a complex environment, where we can't make predictions, is better to be cautious.

Stores don't have the space for that currently. Though it may be possible to redesign them in such a way that they do.

A lot of stores have a "bulk food" section where you can get nuts or granola this way. It takes less space than the same amount of product in individual packages.

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#217
In the third paragraph:

> The new cap appears as a uniform color in Voyager’s range map... compare it to the old cap, whose silicone valve is denser than the surrounding plastic.

Author: you must be completely blind. Both photos show a wide gradient of colors including blue, green, yellow, and deep orange!

Why does orange in the left photo mean "it is silicone" but orange on the right means "it is PP"?

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its cheaper and easier to ensure sanitary products. We love to be romantic about glass but I don't think as easy of a calculation for the total environmental use. Glass is heavier and more expensive to transport. Glass is harder to shape into sizes that make for efficient transportation, for example Costco square milk jugs. I love to use glass when I can but I don't know if using this glass jar which may not even be…

Should plastic containers shedding millions of nano particles be considered sanitary? The only reason it’s used is that the externalities aren’t properly taxed (or not banned IMO). Maybe we should not use things that are “easier” when they’re contributing to a massive amount of pollution. I mean there was an article posted here about finding microplastics in a human fetus. Yet we still continue to use it.

Biologically it is. You could argue on long term effects of microplastics but it's clearly less of a risk than food poisoning.

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#220
post #207
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If coca cola's your example, then I'm going to affirm that yes, it is the lifestyle that generates garbage. People don't _need_ soda. But they want it at a low price that's cheaper than Pepsi. You know what that means? Coke's going to be shipping in the cheapest container possible to keep the price edge - which is plastic. If soda drinkers cared about plastic consumption, they would switch to anything that has glass…

It's not Coke vs Pepsi and pricing competition (Coke costs more than it's competitors), it's using a useless manufacturered product and shipping water in a can instead of drinking from the tap and adding a scoop of sugar and spice of your want.

It is still a pricing competition. Sure Coke costs more, but they're also riding on their brand recognition to bump up their perceived value. No amount of brand loyalty would save them if they had to undergo the price jump that comes with a massive logistics change of switching off of plastic without a proven alternative.

It might cost a buck more per 6pack for Coke right now - but people aren't going to get it if it costs 2-3x more than Pepsi.

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