of the right things, of course. What about… “BOXES”?

We could save lots of money and live better if we tolerated much less standardization in certain things, and demanded much more standardization in others.

For example, we tolerate socio-digital standardization that’s made to order to empty and flatten everything meaningful, from political debate to dating, in relations among human beings, each of which is UNIQUE. That’s not a sign of a smart species that values itself.

But at the same time, we standardize too little, or not at all, lots of inanimate, mass-produced OBJECTS, whose only authentic reason to remain mutually incompatible is to consume more of our time, space and money. That’s not a sign of a smart species that values itself either.

Lack of real, easy interchangeability among electric vehicles batteries is one example: to see how stupid it is, imagine a world where every brand of gas-powered cars needed a different fuel nozzle to fill the tank. Ditto for the lack of standards for stand-alone cooktops, ovens and frames for them, that prevent people to choose whatever combination they want of all those pieces.

PICTURE of FUEL NOZZLE, dida: is this the right nozzle for your car?

Those are topics for future posts, however. Here and now, I am only dealing with the sorely lacking, long overdue standardization of boxes and other containers for retail products of all sorts. Packaging such products in millions different way is a huge waste of money and other resources, for both people and businesses, especially in a digital age.

Mind you, I’m not talking of the fact that in Europe, for example, only about 60% of packaging is recyclable, or that much packaging, especially for “fast-moving consumer goods” (FMCG) uses way too much single-use plastics. I’m talking of the even bigger waste that happens before, exactly because of lack of full standardization of box sizes and above all shapes. Which is bad also because, thanks to digital technologies, this problem is much easier to solve today, with solutions much more beneficial for everyone, than it would have been even just a decade ago. We must just remember recent history.

Containers, again. Yes, THOSE containers

Almost seventy years ago, shipping containers changed the world, by reducing so much the complexity and costs of shipping all sorts of goods around the world to make globalization possible. Yes, there are reasons to think we didn’t get globalization right, but that too is another story. Point is, in the 21st century the retail packaging market, in Europe and elsewhere, should not be “opaque, fragmented, and crucially, largely non-digital” just like bulk shipping was three generations ago. Today, it’s high time to repeat that shipping container revolution at the retail product level.

FIGURE Dockworkers 80 years ago, doing the same kind of work we today pay shop staff to do

Serious standardization in this space would be real innovation of the kind that’s more needed these days: solving problems that actually exist, in a world that, even if environmental issues didn’t exist, remains forced by political and economical factors to make do with as little material resources as possible.

The world of the “One Shape per Size” containers

Imagine a world where there is one open, royalty-free standard for sizes and shapes of boxes, tubes and other containers of consumer retail products, with no actual obligation to adopt it, just strong incentives like e.g. extra taxes in every country on non-conforming containers, and even more taxes for products packaged singularly, without any concrete reason to do it, like this lonely biscuit: BISCUIT IMAGE

That is, imagine a world where the suppliers of water, milk, olive oil, sodas, liquid soap, paint, and almost every other liquid product you may have at home … had really strong incentives to package those liquids in “containers” that were not only in one and only one set of predefined capacities, e.g. (just as an example) 50, 100, 200, 500 ml, 1 liter, 2 liter…. but also, for each capacity, only of the one shape defined by that standard.

Imagine the same standardization applied to squeezable tubes for mayonnaise, toothpaste, glue and everything in between: 20230414 example of containers to standardize jpg

Imagine the same set of “boxes” for solid, dry products like spices, salt, sugar, biscuits, tuna, canned beans… but also for napkins, drawing pins, nails matches, and whatever else is in your kitchen and basement right now.

Imagine that standard including as much as possible also the interconnections of those containers with all their possible caps, just just like you can already screw a nut by any maker to any bolt from any other maker as long as it has the same size and pitch. FOTO CASSETTO SPEZIE

While imagining, please note that all those boxes would be anonymous, without any product or company name permanently painted or stamped on them, so that the same box that initially contained e.g. olive oil could be reused by a fruit juice producer, by just applying a different label.

You can, and should, imagine the same thing also for cosmetics, and every other “mass luxury” thing, where the real product is not what’s inside the box, as much as how marketing-driven packaging makes you look and feel. Such products could still be unique by applying unique covers over the standard boxes, covers that could, no: would also surely double as highly coveted collectibles.

Finally, don’t lock your imagination inside houses, because the same standardization and regulations would apply to many more services, as in this example I recently found about food delivery. If it’s true that:

“Digital-native restaurateurs can now use the same chefs, facilities, ingredients, and packaging to fulfill orders for multiple “restaurants” simultaneously. So whether tonight’s dinner comes from Wings and Things, Wings Plus, or Hot Wings Cafe, you’re getting the same food, in the same container, from the same kitchen."

I’m sure you’ll realize that what would be really wrong with that picture would be if food and kitchen actually were always the same, surely not the containers.

Of course, there are cases where the standard should include different shapes for containers of the same kinds of substances. For example, wine bottles do have concrete reasons to have different shapes than e.g. fruit juice bottles. Equally obvious is the fact that containers for foods should likely be made of different materials than those for e.g. paints. As you will read in a moment, that doesn’t matter, as long as every material it’s actually reusable or at least really, sustainably recyclable, not the kind of greenwashing Coca-Cola and others did a while ago.

Side question: why haven’t those “meta-containers” called “books” already gone all the way through this path? Books printed today are likely much less different in height (and possibly depth) than in the past, but still far from making it possible to exploit every millimeter of shelf space. How many more books would fit in the same spaces, if they just had all the same limited set of standard HEIGHTS, and bookshelf makers knew it? Does anybody know wny this isn’t the case yet?

The REAL reasons to make all boxes the same

You may wonder why the same person that six months ago wrote that most modern innovation is fake because, among other reasons, “everything looks the same” is now proposing to make billions and billions of boxes worldwide to be the same.

The answer is easy: matched with the right digital technologies (more on them later), heavy standardization of all the containers of most retail consumer products would have the same effects of that of their bulk shipping ancestors, without any real negative impact on the quality of the products, that is, eventually, on the quality of our lives.

More explicitly, such a digitally-managed standardization would hugely decrease the human, environmental and financial costs of many more processes, not just packaging as such. Standard boxes for everything may not solve problems like binge shopping, but dealing with a much smaller variety of box sizes and shapes than today would have cascading effects everywhere.

First, it would fit the same stuff in less space, sometimes much less. That is, it would allow every company or individual, everywhere, to always fill, with as little empty space as possible, also the containers of those containers, from crates and pallets to store shelves and house cabinets (maybe even purses?).

In turn, that would greatly reduce not only the energy, raw materials and space needed to make and move not only those “containers of containers”, but also the need for box filling materials which, even if they became all green as e.g. “wooden springs”, are by definition a necessary evil to be minimized anyway. At least in theory, the standard proposed here could also decrease the even the embarrassing packaging of already packaged goods: PICTURE amazon-repackaging DIDA: Left to right: something I actually needed, the box it came in from its factory, the box Amazon was basically forced to ship it in

Third, it would make factory packaging, then warehouse shelving and finally facing, that is “the act of bringing products to the front of the shelf and making sure their labels are facing forward” much easier to automate with equally standardized machinery, through all the stages of many supply chains, from every factory to every store.

Fourth, it would make it simpler, less wasteful and more affordable also the design, production and maintenance by knowledgeable technicians of every machine involved in everything I described so far, from those that would make the standard boxes to the software that would handle the facing.

Fifth, it would make it much simpler and easy to automate, that is more affordable the collection, cleaning, reuse or at least recycling of every container, making overhyped stuff like “AI and computer vision to distinguish cans, bottles, paper, and many other packaging types and recyclables” unnecessary.

Sixth and most important, I’m pretty sure it would bring a bit less stress and debt to lives that could really use a bit more serenity. Stay with me for a moment here, we’re almost done.

Seriously, after an initial shock, what bad effects would all this cause? A time-proven writing rule says that “rules should encourage thinking, not discourage it”. Here, in a similar fashion, I’m just saying that packaging should facilitate living, not discourage it.

What makes you and your wallet healthy or sick, in the most general sense, is what you buy or not, not the boxes it comes in. From the individual point of view, the hard part of all this is to make sure that as much as possible of the savings makes it to the retail price stickers, that is leaves you with more money to buy healthier food or more comfortable shoes. If you are worrying about all the lost jobs this would cause, you do want to read the answer I already gave to this very question.

If you worry that life could become more monotonous and depressing… I agree that having home cabinets and shelves filled with just one small set of tightly interlocking boxes recognizable only by their labels, or having more of your apartment walls bare because you need less cabinets than before may be depressing, initially.

My point, however, is that such standardization should happen precisely to leave you more time and money to spend in much healthier ways, and then fill the wall spaces with memories of those ways, or with collectible or model kits, or everything else that actually IS you, much more than the same different boxes that everybody else has.

Standardization of ideas, feelings and relations is inhuman, no matter how “innovative” it can seem. Standardization of certain objects, instead, is real innovation that can make life better. It’s that simple, really.

Where is AI when we really need it?

Technically speaking, the hard part of all this picture is to actually write the standard, that is to find, for every type and size and container, the precise shape that would lead to the greatest savings of raw materials, energy and money at the global level, that is for all the possible combinations of product categories and more or less local markets.

For example, it would make little sense to propose one shape of 1 liter bottle that were optimal for important markets like wine or sodas, but really inconvenient, for some reason only known to industry experts, for equally important markets like soaps or paints. In short, it’s a huge problem with hundreds of variables, and therefore millions if not billions of possible solutions to find and compare. Luckily, we just got a tool for such problems, or so we were told, at least.

I already said that AI could and should do a lot of actually good things we all badly need. Finding the right combination of container shapes seems another one, that may not be as cool as reading 2000 years old UNROLLED scrolls but would surely be (at the material and most urgent level of course), infinitely more useful. What is AI waiting for? Is anybody already working on this?