Tag: waste

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Cool but wasteful

Vuka. It’s a new-to-me “Intelligent Energy Drink”. My 14-year old son bought it because he thought the bottle was cool. And it is.

However, his comment on what was inside: “pretty disgusting”. He also described it as a “fake energy drink”.

My take: the container is hugely wasteful. The bottle is heavy-gauge aluminum and must have accounted for half of the cost of the product. If the lid were up to the same standard of permanence, it would be a nice thing to hang onto. But it will probably last for about two refills and then strip out. Sad.

Update: See some interesting comments and a rebuttal in the comments.

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American excess

A local bakery / restaurant from a well known chain throws out four huge trash bags of perfectly good bread and pastries every night at closing time. Some nights, very kind people pick up the excess and bring it to homeless shelters or similar. Most nights, it goes into the nearby dumpster.

This chain has ten stores in the Denver area alone. That amount of waste is mind-boggling.

I do not fault them.

Who is at fault for this kind of waste? The American consumer. The manager of the store told my friend who makes those charity bread runs, “If we didn’t have every single item in stock, we’d get complaints from customers who missed being able to buy their favorite item at the end of the day. Then we’d lose them as customers. They would go to another shop.”

We are guilty as a country.

Solution? The years I lived in England, stores would regularly finish their stock near the end of the day. Customers would just buy a different item – or go to a different store. No one would get upset. I would propose that we simply lower our darn picky standards – at least in this case. How would this happen? I don’t have any idea. Do you?

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