An idea

Last Wednesday’s class was about toxic plastic. While discussing how can Eastman develop their strategy to promote the bio-degradable plastic, I have an idea of how to decrease the use of plastic water bottle. The idea was to install a beverage station in convenient stores.

We buy bottled water all the time. Even if we carry a water bottle, we might not always have access to water to fill it. However convenient stores, as their name suggested, are so convenience that they are everywhere, so we ended up buying bottled water and the PET bottles. Is there away to decrease the consumption of PET bottles? Eastman have committed to research on save and bio-degradable plastics. However, I have came up with an idea which can hugely decrease the use of plastic bottles and hence decrease the waste beverage industry caused. That is by installing a system which I would call it “buy your content or pay for the wrapping”.

It is inspired by the plastic bag system we are using now in most European and Chinese supermarkets and convenient stores, where you can either bring your own shopping bag or pay extra to buy a bag from the shop. If we apply this system to beverages, you can either bring your own container or pay extra to buy a bio-degradable bottle from the shop. Basically, supermarkets just need to have several of those beverage filling machines like those bear tabs or the coke machines that are used in McDonald's combined with a bottle selling machine. When consumers do not bring their own bottle, they can buy a bottle first then get their drink, or when consumers bring their bottles along they can start getting their drinks right away. Consumers can insert coins to activate the machine and get the drink they desire to fill their bottle. The machine will calculate the total price base on how much drink consumers filled. Consumers can stop the machine and get changes at any point, or they can pay more to get more drinks.

With this system, consumers are encouraged to reuse bottles and largely decrease the waste. The transportation from the beverage manufacturer to the stores could be realized by big metal containers which could also be reused. The disadvantages of the system could be the waiting time, system breakdown and hygiene concerns. It might seem that using the machines increases the waiting time for us to get a beverage, however, it is not necessarily the choose. In the stores now, we have people buying beverages and non-beverage products mixed together waiting in the queue in front of the cashier. With the new system, consumers are classified into beverage queues and non-beverage queues, which makes each queue shorter. The system breakdown and hygiene concern could be further improved by improving the technology.
I am quite excited about my new invention, and I need look for people who has engineering knowledge to realize this.