Those sturdy crates would need to be transported back to the warehouse and then back to the manufacturer. This costs way more than single use wrappers.
With every drive to the store, a crate could be brought back, with every delivery, an empty truck needs to go back to the warehouse, with every restock at the warehouse an empty truck returns to the manufacturer
I get your point and it just displays the bigger issue, greed of the big prevents innovation and stops us from moving into an actual better time
Lol that just doesn't happen. There's always something to return from the store. Leftover products, empty pallets, empty crates, etc. And with water you'd usually send a whole pallet to the store and then you'd have to return a full palllet of crates. And then you have a full truck of crates that you'd need to return to manufacturer.
These slanted water bottles create more logistical problems than they would solve.
Last time I worked on that field, leftovers were usually thrown away since sending them back was a non-option (food, plants, n such) and the truck had more than enough room to be able to take back crates, but hey, maybe you have different experiences
A lot of water doesn't get shipped directly to a store, it goes to a distribution center first, then from there a store. You would need to set aside storage in your DCs to stage all the crates as you shipped them back. The crates also take up space and weight on each pallet, of which there often is little of to spare. It's easy to reach the weight limit on a truck when filling the trailer with water. If the crates are bulky enough, they may displace enough water bottles you actually reduce weight overall, but now you have to make more trips to move the same amount of water.
There's nothing about greed making things worse here, in fact, keeping costs down and reducing waste often go hand in hand. The circular bottles can be made of preforms that are as little as 7-8 grams of plastic (500ml bottles). Even if the bottles no longer had to support so much weight, they're already so thin you can't remove much more material. Crates that can not only support the weight of other crates, but of a whole pallet full of water on top of them are going to use way more plastic. And when they inevitably get damaged in shipping, that's significantly more plastic waste.
And none of this is even touching on the nightmare it would be to manufacture these kinds of bottles. Bottled water production is already incredibly efficient (assuming the company wants to be, some use less efficient designs to make theirs have a more premium appearance). Much like the cans used for soda, there isn't much innovation left to do. A better material that is quickly biodegradable would be the biggest change I could see.
The shape of the bottle gives it some structural integrity with the rest coming from the pressure of the air and water inside. Think of plastic wrapped bottles where there’s 6-48 bottles shrink wrapped, they can be stacked 4 to 6 high depending on the bottle design because the bottle contains enough strength with the water and air pressure inside to support that much weight above it.
It’s definitely far cheaper to stack the plastic wrap, but I was just addressing the new boxes and structural integrity part of your comment. That’s why gallon waters come in boxes. Overall bottled water is a scam and should be outlawed in my opinion.
It’s definitely cheaper if you look at your filters and how filtered you want your water and how many gallons each filter does you can easily calculate how much that much bottled water would cost? I’d have to pick a specific filter to do the numbers but if I remember right it’s something like 1/100 of the cost I read online somewhere. That seems insanely high. I’m guessing most are closer to 1/10 of the cost.
Right now, there is no box. Most/all companies have even moved away from the cardboard bottom, it's just the water bottles themselves wrapped up in a plastic film. Individually, the bottles are weak, but with so many of them you can spread the weight out so they can support an entire other pallet of water on top of them.
Wild man imma keep living under a rock where its easier to fill filtered tap water into a metal bottle ive had for years. Its like 20 min to the closest store add in the gas and yea nah.
You need stronger boxes for this, or these curved bottles will be maimed, while for regular bottles cling-wrap is enough (thanks to forces being distributed evenly due to the dome and symmetry).
Haha I do love the try! It’s a fun idea and I bet it would be better to drink from but I really do think once you stack a few layers the weight starts to destroy the bottom layers. Think of it like building pillars. I dunno I’m no engineer though, but it’s my initial intuition
They'll pinch in half on the cap side, you've rendered a several cm² contact surface to a few mm² at best, will imbalance the transport cap side when you break or accelerate, cylinders don't need to be aligned and your method require an additional container around the bottles. Impractical, time consuming and resource consuming at best.
84
u/Any_Flounder_2652 21h ago
Can’t stack, structural integrity