Too Small To Fail

Too often we look at recycling in Trinidad & Tobago as this insurmountable logistical nightmare where we need to collect the garbage, separate it, and process it. A lot of the focus has been on recycling food-grade plastics because lets be honest, it's the largest source of plastic pollution because they are almost always single use. However, we don't think about the chemicals we regularly use to clean our homes, cars, yards. These packages are usually tougher to hold the chemicals and as they don't need to be cleaned and processed as thoroughly as food grade products why aren't we thinking about or making moves towards making a change there?

What if we didn't?

What if we made better containers,

that we refilled?

There are three 'fairly viable' options I would like to propose.

1. Refill stations at major supermarkets - We saw it with Pricesmart early on, where the biggest issue was spillage/wastage. Benefits? Customers buy what they need, Producer spends drastically less on the packaging due to reduced need and selling in bulk.
2. Tabletization - Most of the cleaning agents we use are majority, water. Why are we spending $ to move 'mostly water' around the country? We can tabletize the agents, ship the tablets to customers in grocery stores (or even to your door) and (voila!) massive reduction in packaging, transportation, shelving, and other costs.
3. Return Program - Cleaner bottles aren't like food-grade plastic, realistically, if the containers were made better, we could re-use them hundreds and thousands of times before having to dump them. In the same way most other bottled water producers use a return program for their 5 Gallon containers, why can't I return my cleaning bottle and get a credit back for it?

Logistically, we're small enough that these solutions can (some already have been) be implemented fairly easily. The payoff is worth it and we're too small to fail!

N.B. I am not a logistics, cleaning agent or supply chain professional, simply an ad-man putting a thought out there hoping to provoke thought in someone with influence in these companies to consider.