I wrote a paper in college about how wasteful food packing is, and will post it if I can find it. The vast majority of food packaging is now single-use, which is incredibly wasteful. Consider the following hierarchy:

Single-use, non-recyclable < Single-use, recyclable < Washable & reusable < No-wash reusable < No container at all

On the left end of the spectrum would be things like Capri Sun juice containers and pizza boxes, which aren’t recyclable in most places. On the right end would be multi-gallon water jugs, which can be refilled without requiring a washing, and water fountains, which don’t require a container at all (and thus count as Manvironmentally Friendly). In the middle are containers that don’t completely go to waste, but still take some energy to use more than once (e.g. in the form of melting and remolding or simply washing out).

Very few food packages could be reused without washing, but we could save a ton of energy by washing and reusing containers rather than recycling them. In other words, there’s huge leverage for reducing our ecological footprint by moving from recycling to reuse.

In the 1990s, great strides were made in getting people to recycle instead of sending their containers to landfills. Recycling is great in terms of landfill and resource savings, but still consumes a ton of energy. Consider recycling a plastic food container, such as a dairy tub, which requires:

• Energy to rinse the container out (which often involves hot water)
• Energy to transport the container to a recycling facility, which may be hundreds of miles away
• Energy to further clean and melt the item, to produce pellets of recycled plastic
• Energy to transport the plastic pellets to another facility, such as a bottling plant
• Energy to melt the plastic pellets and mold the plastic into something new
• Energy to transport the new container back to the store

Remember bulk foods, those big bins of oats and granola and other stuff you could dispense for yourself in whatever quantity you wanted?

I hardly ever see this setup any more except at high-end stores like PCC and Whole Foods, which are out of reach for most people. I think the concept failed for several reasons, which explain why you don’t see bulk food sections in stores:

• They were gross - any kid could flick a booger in the dried apples or drop the scoop on the floor
• They were hard to use - you had to write a long ID number on each bag
• The bags were flimsy and easy to rip, and largely canceled out the benefit of buying bulk, since you still used a disposable container

We need bulk foods to come back and save all that energy we pour into recycling. There are of course easy solutions to the problems with bulk foods listed above, but they need some incentives to get into the mainstream:

• Use push-drop bins, like they have for coffee, instead of open bins with scoops.
• Provide barcoded little stickers at first, so people can make sure they’re paying for the right food (though this would introduce some waste - it could be phased out once people were used to buying bulk)
• Require people to bring their own containers, and only provide reusable containers for sale - no bags

The last point, of course, is the kicker. Who wants to bring a dozen or more empty plastic containers with them to the store? If there’s no financial incentive, very few people, which in turn drives down the incentive for stores to even have a bulk food section.

The solution is to tax all single-use food packaging, even if it’s recyclable. Perhaps a gradually increasing tax would be the best way to implement this, so people have time to acquire reusable containers and stores and food companies have time to adjust their systems. The tax would have to apply to the packaging used to transport goods to the store as well (such as large cardboard boxes), so there would be an incentive to create a completely closed loop - no single-use packaging anywhere along the supply chain.

It would take some ingenuity to create machines that would dispense food into customer-owned containers in a sanitary manner, since you couldn’t ensure that people would bring in perfectly clean containers. I’m confident that it could be done, though, for most food. Liquids are easy, since we already have the technology to dispense liquids into people’s containers. Oats, coffee, and other bulk-ish foods are also easy, since they can be poured. Crackers, meats, and the like would be the hardest, since you can’t dump crackers out of a chute without breaking them, and meats are just plain messy. Meats could be distributed in store-owned containers with a substantial deposit, and the store could wash and sanitize them upon return.

What do you think of this proposal to close the loop? How could the tax on food packaging be levied fairly, considering the vast array of foods and packages currently on the market?