Want To 'Protect The Environment'? Here's How...

René Heiden pulls two glass yoghurt jars off the shop shelf, and lists the nearby supermarkets in which they can be returned once empty. His Berlin grocery shop avoids single-use packaging in favour of reusable containers, a waste reduction model that is having something of a revival in Germany. But it’s surprisingly hard to get right.

It's something we could do with over here, in place of the huge number of different bins our councils inflict on us. Or the infuriating new bottle caps.  

“You need a range of packaging to make it as convenient as possible for the consumer,” says Heiden. An oil bottle, for example, needs a thin neck and a small spout to help it drip – “you would never put yoghurt in one of those”. Marmalade and spreads, on the other hand, work best in cylindrical jars that a knife can fully scrape.

We used to recycle glass bottles - doorstep milk deliveries, soda bottles returnable for money. Why don't we bring that back?  

“I’m seeing more and more products that use reusable packaging,” says Heiden, who has devoted a wall of his shop Samariter Unverpackt to dispensers of grains and cereals from which customers can fill home-brought containers. “But I also see some producers who are trying to expand, but have to go back because the handling costs are too high.”

Then surely tax breaks would help? 

“The best packaging is the one you don’t produce,” says Nathan Dufour, who leads efforts to promote reuse systems at the campaign group Zero Waste Europe. If you need to use it – for hygiene reasons, say – “then that packaging needs to stay in the loop for as long as possible”. Germany has a head start on many of its neighbours with its bottle deposit schemes, in which customers are charged a bit more upfront for their purchase – whether fancy juice from an organic store or cheap beer from an off-licence – and given the money back when they return the empty glass.

If the efficient Germans can do it, why can't we>