Listening to a presentation at the ICS workshop this week, one of the presenters (Rui Frazão of LNEG) said something to the effect that industry should look to provide services rather than products…which means that instead of selling a washing machine, you sell the wash…which means that people pay for each wash they make at home…the washing machine manufacturer then provides the most energy and water efficient machine, and even look to manufacture the machine so that parts are easily reusable at the end of the useful life of the machine. It’s something that we have been favouring for some time and its nice to hear a respected researcher like Rui Frazão also developing the theme.

My articles on this blog over the last months: see this and this, talks about the reuse of bottles that we buy with say jams and other such products…

You may be also noticing that people are changing the containers they use to store things in the fridge to glass (same shape) and a BTA Free lid. This is directly related to the fact that there are serious concern that the chemicals used in the production of storage containers whose plastics have problematic traits that can be passed to the food…some of these traits can cause serious health problems (like cancer…)…not to mention the problems they cause in the production cycle.

This weekend, while speaking to a friend on this issue, it suddenly came to me that maybe the people selling the glass containers we use as storage, should look to provide the glass containers (bottles) to product manufacturers (ie bottles that come with say jams and other products).

This could in the UK, for example, be effected through a partnership between say Premier Food and Libbey.

This gets rid of an entire unnecessary business line and provides an excellent environmentally friendly service to the consumer. It means that after we have consumed the product (jam), we don’t throw the bottle away…we simply reuse it as part of the life cycle…ie replacing the storage container with containers being provided with our favourite jams…it simply means that the bottle suppliers can be the manufacturer of the storage container.

This of course then gives the possibility for further revenue being generated for people looking for new lids, which can then be purchased online from the manufacturer or which comes as a promotion to increase customer loyalty.

Which then means that one day we may even accept to purchase rechargable jams in sealed bags made from the same BTA Free plastic, which we simply place into the original jar provided…its sooooo much more environmentally: we use dramatically less energy in the production and distribution cycle, resulting in a smaller CO2 footprint, and its soooo much healthier as we get rid of loads of unnecessary chemicals from the production cycle.

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