A company has designed a new, stackable, plastic milk jug. It allows shipping without the need for plastic crates to hold the old jugs and saves delivery trips to stores.

Both Costco and Walmart have adopted these new packages. The only problem is that they forgot to see if shoppers could figure out how to pour the milk from them.

The whole story from the NY Times:
Solution, or Mess? A Milk Jug for a Green Earth

The PR spin, swallowed, as usual by a clueless reporter:

But with the new jugs, the milk crates are gone. Instead, a machine stacks the jugs, with cardboard sheets between layers. Then the entire pallet, four layers high, is shrink-wrapped and moved with a forklift.

The company estimates this kind of shipping has cut labor by half and water use by 60 to 70 percent. More gallons fit on a truck and in Sam’s Club coolers, and no empty crates need to be picked up, reducing trips to each Sam’s Club store to two a week, from five — a big fuel savings. Also, Sam’s Club can now store 224 gallons of milk in its coolers, in the same space that used to hold 80.

Seems like a win-win situation, so why no discussion of the need now to dispose of the shrink wrap and cardboard separators? The amount of non-reusable packaging has gone up, not down, the same as it did when glass bottles were eliminated. Getting more bottles in a smaller space is a “good thing”, but after the trucks deliver the milk they go back empty, so they could be carrying empty crates or even glass bottles. One advance has nothing to do with the other.

OK, profs, what do you call it when your student rewrites a press release and hands it in as their own work?

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 0933 by Robert Feinman and is filed under Environment, Groceries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.