Environment Masters Courses at Surrey

GavinP2015

I thought it might be useful for everyone doing the masters courses at CES to have somewhere to exchange ideas/info' and chat about stuff.

I think this site lets you vote for posts that you like, which can be useful after a while once the list of posts starts to get longer and there's too much to sort through.

One thing that I'm hoping people will use this forum for is discussing ideas for sustainable development and the pros and cons of different ideas. It also might be useful for polishing up ideas for dissertation projects or disregarding them if they turn out to be non-starters.

And putting a photo on your profile helps people to learn each other's names!

Reply 1

GavinP2015

Reusable packaging

And to get things started... one of the ideas I'm interested in is reusable packaging. There are a few examples of when it has been tried, such as milk bottles and various other drinks bottles, some of which have had a buy-back value when you return the bottles.

What do you all think about the feasibility of reusable packaging being introduced for a much wider range of food and drink products?

University of Surrey

Guildford

Reply 2

Steve_P

My thought is that it's a great idea as it helps move towards a closed loop production system, reducing energy and material use. I'm old enough to remember when many soft drink bottles sold in the UK carried a return deposit and were actually re-used not re-cycled :smile:

How many coffee jars sold today are glass - many millions possibly? Allowing people to refill from bulk containers/pumps is also a possibility, as is done for wine and olive oil in some countries.

An issue in our culture today is getting over the customer expectation that the packaging should be cosmetically perfect, can we find a way to actively discourage people buying products that are not packaged in a sustainable way? :s-smilie: