dylaner

Avalon Dairy in BC uses glass bottles, and grocery stores which sell them take them (in exchange for your $1 deposit) and send the bottles straight back to Avalon. They get cleaned and reused directly. If you’re at the store, you can look closely at all the bottles and find the dates they were first used. Alas, I’ve kind of gone off getting them now that we’re using 2L bottles of milk every week - the bigger bottles are extra bulky and my nearest grocery store doesn’t sell Avalon.

I’m still a big fan, though. It’s a good system, it genuinely causes the bottles to be reused (instead of just not made out of plastic, or “recycled”), and it’s so simple. We could easily have this for everything if we regulated (or at least incentivized) specific containers for groceries, at least for things packaged domestically. No more needlessly complicated special jars for different brands of maple syrup. If every company used the same containers, when they reach the recycling depot (hopefully intact, although that’s another problem) we could actually do something sensible with the things.

This project is frustrating :( I would happily use this train if it magically existed today, but to me it feels like it’s eating up all of the oxygen. The trains we have are fine. I wish they were faster. But the core problem is the existing rail network is neglected, antiquated garbage and there aren’t enough passenger trains because there’s only room for freight. It would be a lot of work to improve those tracks and add more trains, but something tells me it would be a hell of a lot cheaper, faster, and more effective over time than a one-off megaproject that will never scale and whose timeline is competing with plate techtonics themselves.