Unbottling

I traveled over the MLK weekend, and ended up staying in a nicely refurbished older hotel. More than a number of other placed I've stayed, they seemed to be serious about energy conservation and minimizing environmental impacts.

One of the little things they did that caught my attention was to provide shampoo in little paper "bottles". Similar in size to the shampoo other hotels typically place in guest rooms, but with far less packaging (and what packaging there was looked pretty readily biodegradable). It might not be true, but the claim on the little container was that it resulted in a 94% reduction in packaging.

This was as ecologically friendly an approach to convenience products as I've seen in any upscale hotel, although not as good as the wall-mounted shampoo/body wash/lotion dispenser I ran into in a budget motel one time. It got me thinking about other products we often buy in bottles.

More specifically, it somehow reminded me that my Dame buys her milk in plastic bags. She buys about a gallon in a large plastic bag, inside of which are three or four smaller bags. The smaller bags fit nicely into a special plastic pitcher. Slide the bag of milk into the pitcher, snip off the appropriate corner, and the thing stores and pours very nicely.

Now "bag milk" has been available in some markets for decades. The original motivation was more likely to save money than to reduce waste. In fact, the whole set-up isn't obviously more ecologically responsible than is the purchase of milk in half-gallon cardboard cartons. Except that most cardboard cartons now seem to come with an "easy pour resealable spout" (like the cap on a soda bottle) mounted on the side. And smaller plastic milk jugs seem to be replacing cardboard cartons, regardless.

So I'm wondering whether, on balance, milk in bags isn't a pretty good solution. And what other products (maybe even shampoo) that we typically buy in bottles might be better, and more responsibly, and less expensively packaged in other sorts of containers.