Sunday, April 18, 2010

Sterile Pop-top Cans

It's hot, and you're on vacation.

You're sitting in a camp chair, feeling pretty darn good.

You reach into the cooler and pull out a can of soda.

You are about to pull the ring to open the can, when you notice that the groove around the rim of the top is smudged with black crud.

Yuck! What is that stuff?!?

That "stuff" is a mixture of rat feces (from the warehouse), road grime and diesel soot (from transportation), and bugs (from the shop at the dock where you bought the soda).

Ugh!

You look around for a solution, but this is a campsite--it doesn't have running water.

You could try to wash off the can in the lake, but who knows what might be swimming in the lake. Didn't you read just last week that hikers are contracting Cryptosporidium from meltwater in the Rockies? Is lakewater safe?

With a sigh, you swirl the can upside down in the meltwater at the bottom of the cooler (hey, at least the ice was made from chlorinated water, or was it?), wipe off the top of the can with your shirt, and hope for the best.

It doesn't have to be this way.

What we need is an improved canning machine. It would do everything current canning machines do, but would add a tough aluminum-foil cover over the top 1" of the sides of the can, and the entire top of the can. As long as the foil was not torn, the surfaces under the foil would be sterile.

To open this improved can, you would tear the foil to expose the pull ring and drinking area, much like tearing the foil on a champagne bottle exposes the wire that holds the cork in place. After tearing the foil, you would fold it away from the drinking area, like the petals of a flower (up, to the sides, and down), exposing the still-sterile interior. Then pull the ring, and drink.

The canning machine would melt the aluminum foil to the side of the can, so the foil and can are a single unit. This would keep the foil from becoming litter, and would make the can/foil unit easy to recycle together.

Canners and bottlers are always jockeying for position. Cans are lighter and easier to recycle. But bottled liquids taste better than canned liquids, and screw-tops on bottles expose sterile drinking surfaces. Adding sterile drinking surfaces to cans could tilt the advantage back to canners, so they should be eager to upgrade to the new canning machines. In addition, if one beverage maker insists on sterile cans, the rest of them will have to do so as well or risk liability.

While working to land the first major contract, the new canning machines could be used to make cans safe for high-risk patients, and for infants.

No comments:

Post a Comment