Danilo Makio’s milk carton is half-recycled before you even open it. His design takes a familiar idea (for a lot of the world, if not America)—a bag of milk in a rigid jug—but opts to make the whole thing recyclable.
The Re-Pack carton comes in two parts. An outer "jug" made from cardboard, plus an inner bio-plastic bag which contains the milk. Unlike regular Tetrabrik-style cartons, which need to have their parts separated before recycling, and then the actual carton processed with lots of water to reclaim its materials, Makio’s design is pre-separated. You just toss each part into the appropriate recycling receptacle when you’re done.
The bag-in-a-jug design is familiar in many parts of the world. A good chunk of Canada has used them for many decades now. There, you buy multipacks which contain several bags, then drop them into a jug and pierce the bag to use it. The idea is sound, but there are drawbacks. One is handling the bags themselves, which are as hard to grapple and to stack as you might expect. Another is that the bag can fall out of the jug, or you can just make a bad cut when you open it and have to put up with a dribbling bag until it’s empty.
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