Refill it yourself! Above: Sundance Natural Foods in Eugene, Oregon provides used, clean jars for their bulk customers at a reasonable price. These jars and bottles come from The Glass Station, a life-long effort of refdlables activist Alice Soderwall. Below: The collection at the Glass Station. Thousands ofjars have been washed, sorted and reused through this neighborhood project now generously housed in Sundance's Mercantile store. Opposite: At the Hofbrduhaus in Munich, Germany, several hundred personal mugs are locked up in racks for regular patrons to remove by themselves. Unlocked systems like this for beer and coffee mugs can be found around the world. up and down the east coast. Many retail outlets complain about retumables, but chains such as this one don’t note any problems; they opened 14 new stores just last year. Stewart’s milk comes in a Lexan plastic container similar to Lochmead Dairy’s. Its soft drinks and beer are sold in refillable glass containers. Confident with its success in the retail market, Stewart’s has extended its refillable bottle policy to include school milk programs. Last year Stewart’s serviced 35 different schools in New York with refillable Lexan half-pint bottles. Stewart’s executives say that the initial cost per bottle is higher than coated-paper containers, but by the end of their life-cycle they are a mere half a cent each. The bottles are eliminating trash disposal costs for the 700,000 paper cartons that have been thrown away annually by the Saratoga Springs school district. Stewart’s invested $100,000 for equipment to handle the new bottles including a D&L manufactured bottle washer and an inspection/ conveyor system. According to GE Plastics, next year 45 more school districts will adopt half-pint refillables in Connecticut, New Jersey, and Washington. Rising Moon Ravioli of Eugene begins its second year of operation with much success. The company sells both a peanut curry sauce and a red sauce in refillable 16oz former mayonnaise jars. The operation is run out of a home and is quite small, so they clean their used containers without the aid of a mechanical bottle washer. Each of the jars carries a 25 cent deposit, resulting in a rather impressive number of returns. They are not yet using returnable containers for their frozen ravioli, their primary product. While there are no legal restrictions, many small ecology-minded businesses have difficulty finding standard containers for solid foods. The older and the less affluent parts of the world are well ahead of the United States in efficient and careful use of materials. In New Brunswick, Canada, Premier Frank Mckenna introduced a tough Page 28 RAIN Spring 1993 Volume XIV, Number 3
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