The James Dyson Awards, a sprawling event that garners thousands of entries from design students the world over, is a pretty phenomenal wellspring of ideas--the short list runs into the hundreds. Treehugger points us to one concept we hadn't seen: A collapsible milk jug that makes the milk last longer.
The designer--who has to remain anonymous for now, since the contest isn't over--points out that plastic milk jugs basically foment milk spoilage, because they trap air in the container. And that's what the concept, Fresh, fixes. As the milk level gets lower, you collapse the container bit by bit, to prevent undue air exposure. The designer claims that experiments show that the milk lasts a week longer as a result.
A product like this could be a huge boon to other countries: To save plastic, Canada and parts of Europe require offer milk sold in plastic bags, which the users take home dump into permanent containers. And that, apparently, makes the milk go bad even faster than it would in a plastic container.
We wonder: Couldn't designs like these be built into the design of a standard milk jug itself? Why couldn't we design accordion-style ridges into milk containers, so that we could collapse those as well?
[The Design Blog via Treehugger]
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Related Stories: | Topics:Design, James Dyson Awards, Design Concepts, packaging design, Milk Jugs, Student Design, Innovation, Technology, James Dyson, Canada, Europe |
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Recent Comments | 5 Total
July 28, 2009 at 2:55am by Alex Rykovo
"To save plastic, Canada and parts of Europe require milk to be sold in plastic bags"
A big WTF to that....I live in Canada and I have never heard of this. What a ridiculous idea. The amount of plastic it would save would be miniscule since you are only switching to a thinner type of plastic, and leakages would be rampant.
I wonder if Cliff Kuang would like to buy a bridge from me...
July 28, 2009 at 4:51am by Eric Reiss
I live in Denmark and haven't seen bagged milk in Europe either. But according to a year-old article in London's Daily Telegraph, Sainsbury is doing this and in Canada "60% of fresh milk is already sold in bags."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2098737/Milk-in-bags-hits-Sainsbu...
Hmm...true story? Or is research on the internet fraught with dangers?
July 28, 2009 at 10:22am by Mikaël Baillairgé Lafontaine
I also live in Canada... long story short, nobody forces nobody to sell milk in bags. They do however sell it cheaper this way in family packs (like four 1L bags). But you are supposed to put the bag , not the milk, in a pichet and cut one corner, the empty space in the bag collapsing on itself making it ... the ultimate milk container I guess.
sorry, link is in french, but there are pics
http://coyote-des-neiges.blogspot.com/2007/02/les-poches-de-lait.html
July 29, 2009 at 9:31am by Ash Sangamneheri
I live in London, and all super markets including Sainsbury sell milk is plastic bottles. I have yet to see milk in plastic bags here. Though in places like India, almost all milk is sold in plastic bags, which is not ideal as you collect 100s of them in a month.
Whatever happened to glass milk bottles? We used to get them as kids, you had to exchange your empty bottles for filled ones. Simple.