I just wanted to chime in with a tip for people who are struggling to get every last drop of tasty condiments out of containers. There are tiny rubber condiment spatulas designed to aid you in your quest for total condiment use. They are also useful for skin care products, but I wouldn't suggest using the same ones for both applications.
There's a book from 25+ years ago on the design of cardboard boxes which goes to similar levels of obsessive detail. Part Art college, design school, industrial design and part coffee table book.
Cardboard, it's origami for industry: sheet form, now optimise assembly, cost and structural integrity alongside ease of production...
It's incredible that we designed a material for robustness that takes hundreds of years to break down, and it is the default material for designing single use everyday items, and then rely on all the efforts of an ineffective recycling program to maybe get a couple more uses out of it.
Heinz Ketchup Cap: may have solved the problem of storing the bottle upside down, but it doesn't solve the problem of 3% of the product remaining in the container and being almost impossible to retrieve.
Sriracha Bottle Cap: it's a fun design, but in my experience it tends to turn filthy, sticky and basically break. Kind of terrible, really.
Vita Coco Bottle Cap: okay if it works, very annoying if it doesn't. The whole container is a recycling nightmare, fwiw.
The main packaging issue is the single-use target. In the past we have had a concept and an industry about recycling packages in various ways but to "simply" and "make things more efficient so profitable" we decide that a single-use solution is better.
That's was true in an age of raw material abundance where a light and disposable package means less transportation cost, simple infrastructures, less distributed human labor requirements etc. You can pack milk in a factory and directly ship it to stores where the only need is putting them on some supermarket shelf. In the past there is a need for glass bottles who are fragile and heavyweight, they need to be cleaned up, there is an industry to wash/recycle them, many stages in line etc...
The result of modern food packaging is that we are able to concentrate stuff, few big factories in exotic places, more products on shelves, cheaper product. However now we start seeing that such efficient move is not sustainable... I bet in the future we will came back somewhat, and such move will hurt MUCH...
While this is technology is beautiful, I think it would be easier to visualize how these products work by looking at old-fashioned still pictures of their disassembled parts.
And yet, I wish none of my packages had these, and would let me cut a corner off or stick to simple caps. I must have underdeveloped motor skills, but if there is one guaranteed thing to happen is that ketchup sprays everywhere, dosage caps get clogged and dry out, caps are placed such that I can't get all contents out, etc. etc.
For me, none of them work. And they often seem like an expensive component.
My 2 cents is whatever design it is, packaging should be always serving 2 main purposes: User friendly and Environment friendly.
The planet dies everyday by our creations .. Yet we keep marveling at our creations everyday. Nothing changeth.
So curious about how they achieve the visuals on this.
> Every time you open the refrigerator, a heroic engineering effort looks back at you.
Yeah but the biggest effort went into making it cheap.
Pretty incredible work for stuff that’s just going to end up incinerated or in a landfill…
Am the only one seeing a 57 in the Heinz cap scan ?
website broken for anyone else? "Loading Scan" forever
Amazing!
That’s a lot of effort being put into this website (not to speak of the scans themselves).
Does anyone know how they monetize this page? Or is it just a hobby project?
It's weird that CT scans cost hundreds (thousands?) of dollars when used in medicine but at the airport everyone's baggage is routinely scanned for approx. $free.
Is the hardware and software needed for CT scans really that expensive or not?
Can someone please focus the same amount of energy that was put into making this visualization into figuring out how to abolish plastic in general?
This is very interesting, but I can’t help but feel that a glass bottle with a metal cap (and one of those Dutch condiment spatulas) would be just fine for all these applications and also be more easily and effectively reused and recycled.
I re-use jam jars for food storage, drinking glasses, mini herb gardens, etc. and could incorporate bottles, jars, and other glass containers into a variety of needs around the house if they were designed with second and third lives in mind.
Add in health effects of microplastics/chemical leaching and glass is again a winner.
Transportation costs and breakage are perhaps higher, but maybe that’s a cost we should accept?