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from the well,-that's-certainly-different dept.
AlterNet reports
Forget plastic bag bans. Berlin is now home to a supermarket that's gotten rid [of all] disposable packaging. Original Unverpackt ("Original Unpackaged") [Google translation], which opened Saturday, is more of a shop, to be exact, but its 350-some products -- including from fruits, vegetables, dry grains and pourable liquids like yogurt, lotion and shampoo -- are dispensed into refillable containers. (Some liquids come in bottles with deposits on them, which is already standard in Germany).
The shop, backed by crowdfunding, is a creative experiment in a new kind of shopping, one that takes the ethics of stores like Whole Foods to a new level. It sells mostly organic products, each of which is labeled with its country of origin, and eschews brand names. Sara Wolf and Milena Glimbovski, the duo behind the project, were driven by the slogan[1] "Let's be real, try something impossible."
It remains to be seen if the store's scalable -- and whether it will catch on with the public. One "group of Germans" interviewed by NPR Berlin[2] complained that the store "looks too pretty and nice, and too bourgeois"; CityLab characterized such sentiments as reflecting a sense that "living a supposedly pared-down, less wasteful life is essentially a lifestyle hobby for people with enough spare cash to play at green dress-up." But while many of the products offered, perhaps because they're organic, tend to skew toward the pricier end of things, others are equivalent or cheaper than standard supermarket fare, one German newspaper reports [Google translation]. And a virtue of the fill-your-own-container model is that customers can purchase ingredients in exact amounts, meaning they don't have to overspend for food they don't need.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday September 22 2014, @02:04AM
Save 1 US$ on packaging. Pay up 1000 US$ for a visit to the emergency room at the hospital. Environmental savings, negative.
I wouldn't worry about the cleanliness of my own stuff. The big problem is that not all people have a sense of hygiene!
"Clean" your fingers with your mouth and then "clean" the tap of whatever fluid that you handle? or drinking by putting the tap end into the mouth. Or the simple scenarios of using fingers that has touched public environment with coliform bacteria (ass) and flue viruses that then ends up on your vegetables etc. Or just sneezing in the shop, you think they will discard their products? nope, they continue to sell it.
So packaging is bad. But there's a reason why it's used..
Can someone explain this "Some liquids come in bottles with deposits on them, which is already standard in German". Is there some kind of standard bottle system in Germany? Anyone that uses fluid containers of metal should be aware of the use of Bis phenol A in those.
Some people has taken the raw food concept to the extreme by making burgers with raw meat. It works with farms that pay good attention to hygiene and have good luck. But the risk for serious infections that can screw you up is then present.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 22 2014, @03:21AM
If it's anything like here in the Netherlands, it just means that any plastic bottle >1 liter has an extra charge (say 25 cents), which you get back by returning the bottle, which will then be recycled.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Monday September 22 2014, @08:21AM
Can someone explain this "Some liquids come in bottles with deposits on them, which is already standard in German".
That's probably one of the recycling setups where the customer pays a little extra per recyclable container, then can get the money back if they turn in the clean, empty container to a recycling center later on. I don't know how many other nations have it set up that way, but Wikipedia says there's eleven American states that have similar schemes [wikipedia.org]; in California where I live, for example, it's 5¢ for eligible containers under 24 ounces and 10¢ for anything larger.
(Score: 1) by jcm on Monday September 22 2014, @10:22AM
I don't know how many other nations have it set up that way
In France, there was a similar system a lot of years ago. It was called "consigne".
We bought glass bottles filled with liquids.
When we returned the glass bottles, we got some money back.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday September 22 2014, @06:41PM
Many drink containers have the list of states printed in tiny characters on a side, and sometimes the amount.