Like how port facilities, trucks and ships are standardised to certain container, the idea is: a small container for foodstuffs that is core to the entire grocery supply chain from transpoint to refrigerator.. that the containers be designed to be a vegetable, or dry goods, or meats, or liquids by color coding.Grocery carts would have these containers in them making checkout very simple if they ever get RFID's working, no more bags,no more boxes for food stuffs, but recyclable washable durablecontainers that replace the transit-packaging for foods. As morewebvan sorts of services operate, the standardised container allows a grocery delivery to be put straight in to a refrigerator, and empty containers taken back. The labor spent in re-packing food, over and over across the supply chain from warehouse to cook, would be saved, as well asconsumers not having to bag groceries, and all the landfill wastegenerated by disposible food packaging. With a container-food system, double sized, 4x sized and large containers would share shipping space and make warehousing easy using systems like this: http://www.unitronics.com/Content.aspx?page=PalletWarehousing
A retail container might be sterile and have sub-casings for standardised food stuffs. Its a radical overhaul of the grocerysupply chain on the retail side i'm proposing as a way to makethe supply chain land-fill neutral, and to offer a better way tohandle groceries, like the old system of milk bottles, exceptextended beyond bottles to the entire food chain.
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The huge and wealthy advertising business that persuades you to buy one or another box or bottle of stuff might feel somewhat unhappy with the idea.
They shouldn't. The idea is not to exclude, simply that the grocery cart oftoday might be say 6 standard containers much like those shopping carts composed of 6 carry-in wire baskets used in supermarkets, and these baskets be closableand removable, to trunk, where a wise car manufacturer might have trunk-racks to lock down say 10 of the standard container system. to transit van, and easily carried and stored, the fancy bottle of water, or whatever, simply is selected off the shelf in to the standard transport system... no-re-bagging, no-unpacking at home, as the whole container slides in to the fridge and functions as the bin. If some products went further in to package integration, the supermarket might offer a discount, people think with their money if they can get the system good enough.No more broken bottles of wine in the trunk, no more carrier bags, no more needing to unpack boxes on to grocery shelves, simply slide in the standard container in to the shelf and open the end. The waste of our grocery supply chain will kill the earth if we do not scale down the packaging burden.
I often walk over my lunch period and am continually amazed by how much litter is comprised of beverage containers. Be it liquor bottles, paper-cups from fast-food or pop-cans, they're everywhere.
If we can do standardized food containers, I'd also be in favor of standardized and reusable beverage containers.
I also like the way your proposal specifys reuse instead of recycle. It's much more energy-intensive to collect aluminum or glass and then to smash them down to make new containers--much more efficient to reuse them.