Kitchen staple sold at Coles and Woolworths with major problem: 'Annoying'
The CEO of a major recycling company has listed which supermarket products 'bug his industry, and explained how their design can be transformed.
It’s a common kitchen product sold at Coles and Woolworths that's so “annoying” countless YouTube videos and Reddit threads have been dedicated to it. Saxa salt and pepper grinders have been engineered in a way that prevents them from being opened and easily refilled, so shoppers have shared novel ways to break them open.
In one Aussie video, a man uses a hammer and a block of wood to separate the glass base from the plastic top. A separate clip from the UK suggests using a bowl of boiled water to expand the plastic, and then a tea towel to help “twist and pull” it free.
Other brands of salt and pepper grinders sold by the supermarkets alongside Saxa could easily be opened and refilled.
Sticking the top and bottom together makes the grinder a challenge to reuse, but it also creates a second major problem. Despite it being made from glass and plastic which are ordinarily easy to process, separating the two components is also a major challenge for recyclers.
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Product designs that 'bug' recycling CEO
Richard Kirkman is the CEO of international recycling company Veolia's operations in Australia and New Zealand. In an interview with Yahoo News, he said most products made from more than one material are harder for the company to recycle.
“The secret to recycling is having a lot of stuff made from the same thing. Plastic bottles are a great example — there are a lot of them and they’re pretty much the same. So we can set up equipment to gather them together and then process them,” he said.
Despite investing millions of dollars in recycling innovation there are some products that are still a struggle because of their size. Kirkman has a short list of packaging types that are sold in supermarkets which continue to “bug” him.
“When you buy lemon juice, and pop that tiny little bit of plastic off the top – it’s like a fingernail’s worth — it’s never going to be recycled. And lots of other bottles have that little pull-away piece of plastic. You don’t need to have that!” he said.
“And those little soya sauce fish are never-ever going to get recycled. We could think of ways to replace all those little bits and bobs that get thrown away and lost. They find their way out into the environment because they're so small.”
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Simple product design that's been perfected
Kirkman argues designers are good at designing reusable and recyclable items. To help stop bottle caps making their way into landfill, European manufacturers now tether them to bottle tops so they aren’t lost.
He believes a collective effort is needed in Australia by manufacturers to overhaul bad packaging and homogenise design so it can be effectively recycled.
“Think of those gas containers you use to fire up your barbecue. They're all the same. They all get returned. They don't even have to be recycled,” he said.
“If we looked at what we're buying and making packaging more uniform, we'd be able to have more return systems and much more recycling going on.”
In Australia, Saxa is owned by US multinational Kraft Heinz. It did not respond to questions from Yahoo News about its product design.
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