veteran+ wrote: ↑April 8th, 2021, 4:32 am
Not really accurate on the waste issue, though it sounds logical.
Small bottles are the biggest contributor to waste by the nature of its convenience (size) and use. They are also inefficiently used and discarded.
By the store not selling the small bottles I don't see how it will stop those bottles from showing up in meetings, gatherings, etc. and inefficiently used and discarded as you describe above. The customer will just go to some other store, or use their office supply provider, coffee provider, or one of the many other parties who gladly will sell single use bottles of water.
You are assuming by the small bottles not being there, a number of people will simply not buy any one time use bottled beverage at all. Which will certainly happen, but will it happen in enough numbers to really reduce container waste?
Maybe before, the store sold 500 .5L bottles of water in a day (include 6pks, cases, etc.). Now the store sells an additional 100 1.5L bottles of water in a day and sells 200 of other bottled beverages instead that it wasn't selling before. How much packaging is really being saved? You are just moving many customers from one package to another.
I often wonder if selling cases of 24 .5L Waters is even profitable for the stores at this point in time. They take up a ton of freight space on the truck, often are on sale at a very low price point (Safeway runs them under $2 routinely in NorCal; Safeway has a plant that makes this bottled water in central CA, also it bottles water for most of Starbucks in the US which I suspect is where much of the profit comes from from that water bottling operation).
Another comment I have on this subject is how many of the stores (not Trader Joe's who breaks the single unit price down to the case unit cost) go about pricing this bottled water. One .5L Bottle for .99 or a case of 24 bottles for $2-$3. This seems to really encourage the customer to buy a case even if they don't need it. Even if the single bottle was .50 or .59, I'd be inclined to buy the 3 or 4 bottles I need and leave it at that. And driving the customer to buy a whole case when the customer doesn't need it, creates additional plastic waste. I have bought cases while traveling and left most of the case with the rental car people a handfull of times. Do they consume the sealed waters or hand them out, or just throw them out, who knows.
I remember in the 90's when the bottled water moved from the cleaning supply aisle to the beverage aisle. Initially the bottled water was marketed as a premium product. You took the bottle of water, usually Spring Water. It tasted better than tap water. The source of the water was on the label. The cost per bottle was such that you weren't going to waste the bottles. Then into the 00's and suddenly these bottles of water fell lower and lower in cost, many were just tap water put into a bottle, the bottles got thinner and thinner and water tasted worse and worse. Like I said this is a product I purchase only when traveling as I have been dissatisfied so many times with the taste of the water.
If someone really wants to get rid of these bottles I suggest a health study for how much melted plastic folks are ingesting when they drink some of these bad tasting bottles of water. Because some of these bottles of water I've opened over the years (always the cheap generic store brand ones) sure taste like melted plastic smells.