ABSTRACT
The subject of packaging re-use may summon up slightly nostalgic images: children collecting empty lemonade bottles to be refilled, or the milkman in a 1950s film making his way down the path of a suburban house with empties clinking in his crate. Central to these images are packs for milk and lemonade that were designed for re-use. They were embedded in systems for production, packaging, distribution and consumption, with built-in features intended to influence people’s behaviour to promote the re-use of the packaging involved. Milk bottles had ‘please rinse and return’ embossed on them; lemonade bottles carried a small deposit that was an incentive to return them. Both were robust enough to stand a number of journeys. But for the UK at least, these images smack of another era, when closed loops of re-use fit with shorter packaging supply chains and a doorstep delivery system, both of which have been overtaken by developments in the retailing of food and drink. They are images that do not fit with our times, characterized as they are by an assumption of diverse choice for consumers who are mobile, the standardization of packaging for long supply chains and the rule of disposability, all of this supported in consumers’ minds by the idea that we can dispose of packaging with a clear conscience if we recycle it.
