Refill, please

Today I've eaten a yoghurt. It took me ~3 minutes to smash it. Now I'm throwing away the packaging. Jaruwan tells me that it takes around 100 years for plastic to decompose. I googled it, and plastic bottles seem to decompose in over 70 up to 450 years.

It's a lot of time for a ~3 minutes use. How many people would be eating yoghurt at this precise moment? Imagine how much waste is in just one day.

Not only cups of plastic, but Coca-Cola cans, soap containers, milk bricks, toothpaste packagings, fragrance bottles, etc. I always wonder where all this trash is going and at what rhythm is piling up.

Why businesses don't offer product refills? Imagine a Coca-Cola machine at the supermarket offering refills for half of the price of bottled Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola is doing a good business selling plastic bottles, but could they do any better by selling only the beverage?

How different supermarkets would be without wrapped products!

It would be like going to a hotel buffet. Imagine scanning a QR code and getting what you want without passing through the cashier. Scan your QR code, refill, and go to a new machine. Supermarkets would only need to create machines prepared to refill a fixed quantity of product XYZ after pressing a button.

People could reuse their boxes and packages several times, and product information could be online. Why aren't businesses doing it? Wouldn't businesses save tons of money in design, R+D of new packaging, and so on?