New Rules (proposals of laws that will fix problems)

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Inspired by Bill Maher’s “New Rules” segment of his show, but not as satire. Some satire is perhaps welcome but this is like a serious bug tracker for the real world (not bugs in software apps).

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activistPnk

Here's a small one for the zerowaste folks - all jars must be compatible with canning lids (self.newrules)

submitted 2 months ago by JacobCoffinWrites to c/newrules

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Jars are used to contain tons of different things, and require different form factors to do so. That said, I have a hard time seeing any benefit to the incredible range of dimensions on the types of lids products currently use (often different than each other only by millimeters). Standardization could improve reuse tremendously.

So my proposal is this:

Establish around five diameters for jar openings that best fit the many use cases.
Standardize the threads.
Jars can be whatever shape, height, width you want but their openings must conform to those standards.
Ideally these standard sizes will include the existing canning jar dimensions.

Then, with the production of home canning rims and lids that fit those dimensions, all jars used in commercial products can be canning jars.

I'm not proposing this IRL because I know it would require a lot of changes in industry and assembly lines and I'm not sure how that would balance against the benefits of standardization. But the current system seems unnecessarily wasteful, even if glass is easier to recycle than many materials.

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[–] activistPnk 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

There are some brands that align with the mason convention. It’s rare though. I think a couple tomato sauce producers and then you have tiny canning operations producing “homemade” jam. They get my business just for that reason. Apart from those sparse cases it’s a mess.

What you suggest is only part of the equation. Unless you’re cultivating mushrooms, you would only want to keep a dozen or so jars anyway. So they would need to charge 10¢ per jar at the cash register, then give you 10¢ back for every jar you return. In the beer bottle context, you put the bottle in a machine which scans the barcode of the label. If it matches a list of beers that are in thicker reusable bottles, it gives you 10¢ credit (or 40¢ if it’s the kind with a clamp down cap). Each bottle goes back to the brewery which then has industrial bottle washers, and a laser that detects fractures and discards. Some beer makers opt to use the thinner more fragile bottles. You are not charged extra and can only recycle (not reuse) the glass. I don’t know what the incentive is for breweries to use the reusable ones, but that incentive would need to be given to all canning companies who opt-in.

I guess it would be hard to mandate because importers would be outraged. You can get all importers on board with English incredients labels (just a sticker) but forcing them to change the container would probably be a show-stopper. OTOH, if one country does it first they could get away with setting a standard for the world. Hopefully the standard sizes would be metric.

It’s notable how Europe twisted Dell’s arm. Europe said Dell machines cannot enter unless they disassemble quickly and trivially for waste separation. Dell was outraged, resisted, did not want to have a separate assembly line for Europe, then gave in to the demand. Dell came to realise that forcing easy disassembly meant things had to snap together without screws, which in fact made it much cheaper to assemble as well. Ultimately Dell saved a lot of money on production and made the machines snap together worldwide. So forcing importers to do better could be viable anyway.