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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 22 2014, @07:54AM
How many milk bottles? My son used to use four simple plastic bottles since when he was an infant and occasionally until today (he's now six). We never used any serious abrasives to clean them other than those that come with a household sponge, I doubt you'd consider the little bottle brushes I used as anything special since you can buy a similar one at any supermarket for less than a dollar, and I don't think ordinary dishwashing soap qualifies as a dangerous liquid. My son's still very much alive and healthy. The same is true of all the plates and pans in my household. I don't think I've ever gotten food poisoning in my life, much less from eating food prepared in my own kitchen by my own hands. You overstate the need for industrial-strength disinfection you allude to. Just wash the same containers you bring to the supermarket just like everything else you use in your household.
Frankly, I think it would be great if more supermarkets did the same. I see discarded packaging make up an appallingly large fraction of my household's waste.