Call me a huge dork, but I’m really excited about this new milk jug design taken up by Wal-Mart and Costco. They’re rectangular, allowing them to be packed far more tightly in shipment, use less packaging, and have a greatly reduced overall environmental impact. This is precisely the sort of small manufacturing modification that big business has been without incentive to make while fuel was cheap, but that has been so badly needed. (I’ve been chewing over the design of the cereal box for the past couple of years. There’s a package ripe for improvement.) It’ll take a bit for people to learn this new jug, to adapt to the idea of tilting it in place, rather than lifting it up, but that’s an easy hurdle. My only concern is who owns the patent on this jug, and whether they’re charging for its implementation. Our milk comes in glass bottles, on which we pay a deposit, so I won’t be trying these new jugs anytime soon.
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It was a real disappointment when these cool jugs disappeared from my local Costco. When I asked the guy why they were gone, he told me that I was the only person in the county who liked them. But for all the reasons you cite, they were great, and I hope they come back. (From a partner in domestic dorkiness . . .)
I also get my milk in glass jars from the farm and we return them each week and they get sterelized and reused. It was difficult to get the idea of pouring milk from a mason jar the first week, but it went okay after that.
These are great for all the reasons listed above. How about offering both jugs, and price them accordingly due to the extra cost of fabrication and shipping on traditional jugs. How many people will pay a priority for packaging when they can’t afford gas?
The costs associated with running two parallel large-scale bottling operations, on top of the costs incurred during the traditional and inefficient bottling method, would only make us waste even more resources getting goods to the market.
Paint cans. Standard round paint cans with the pry-off lid and that little wire handle that digs into your hand. They’ve been in use, without a single design change for what? Something like 100 years? The design sucks. Paint gets all into the edge where the lid needs to press down into and then you can’t close it all the way. It’s hard to pour from in a tidy manner. The handle is terrible.
Get rid of ’em. Lets start putting paint in the new milk containers or something.
Enter Dutch Boy. It’s about time.
Along those same lines is the wine tetra pack. I work at a wine shop, and have talked many customers into trying the “Yellow and Blue” Argentinian Malbec in the tetra box.
A lot of wine consumers turn up their noses at anything not in a bottle, but you’re getting a much better wine for the price (not to mention it’s a liter instead of the standard 750 ml). Highly recommended if you’re looking for bang for your wine buck in the $10 range.
I wish there was some way to recycle Tetra Paks. They are recyclable, in the abstract, but since they’re made out three layers of material (paper, foil, and plastic), they’re tough to tear apart and downcycle. There are a bunch of places in the UK where they can be recycled, but I don’t think that any such service exists in the US. I suspect that using Tetra Paks over bottles is a net positive, if you’re buying wine that’s been shipped from California or Europe, but it sure would be nice if the packaging didn’t end up in a landfill.