The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, Starbucks, and other big brands are collaborating with Closed Loop Partners to roll out reusable cups as default takeaway packaging across restaurants in Petaluma, California, and encourage consumers to reuse their beverage containers.
The Petaluma Reusable Cup Project is brought to consumers by the NextGen Consortium. Led by Closed Loop Partners’ Center for the Circular Economy innovation arm, the multi-year consortium seeks to tackle packaging waste in single-use foodservice by improving the design, commercialization, and recovery of foodservice packaging alternatives.
Starbucks and McDonald’s are listed as founding partners of the consortium. The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo are sector lead partners; WWF is the environmental advisory partner; and supporting partners include Peet’s Coffee, JDE Peet’s, Wendy’s, Yum! Brands, Delta Air Lines, and Toast.
In its latest project, over 30 restaurants in the City of Petaluma will make reusable to-go cups the default option, at no extra cost to consumers, from 5th August. The move is hoped to replace ‘hundreds of thousands’ of single-use cups and create return habits among consumers, a ‘key factor’ in establishing successful reuse schemes.
According to Waste Advantage, 50 billion single-use cups are bought and thrown away across the United States every year. The Center for the Circular Economy’s research suggests that these cups are purchased from restaurants, used for less than one hour, then disposed of at home, work, or school.
Existing takeaway reusable cup systems, as well as consumers’ personal cup use, are still thought to be hindered by low adoption and low returns. The NextGen Consortium hopes to make it easy for consumers to remember to bring their own containers to restaurants and return one that has been given to them.
Participating restaurants will include Peet’s Coffee and Dunkin’; KFC and The Habit Burger Grill, owned by Yum!; Starbucks and licensed Starbucks cafés in Target and Safeway, owned by Albertsons Companies; and a range of local cafés and restaurants. The variety of large national chains, local independent restaurants, convenience stores, community hubs, and public locations is hoped to set a new standard for consumer habits and cultural norms.
Over 60 cup return bins will also be installed across the city. Used and returned cups will be collected, washed, and recirculated by Muuse, a winner of the NextGen Cup innovation challenge in 2018; the company will manage all servicing and reverse logistics for the initiative.
The Petaluma Reusable Cup Project will run until November and collect baseline data regarding customer participation and environmental impact. This will be used the gauge whether the model can be scaled up; it will also be available to businesses and regulators as a reference point to design new reuse systems and develop new regulations for packaging.
The city was chosen for the initiative due to its geographical benefits, with its ‘dense layout’, a ‘tight cluster’ of restaurants and local shops within walking distance, and its proximity to both suburban and rural areas. These are expected to be useful in testing a reuse system, with local stakeholders working with the consortium to identify the best locations for return points and encourage participation in the scheme.
They are also said to have helped adapt the initiative to local policy and infrastructure. Petaluma’s policy environment is also identified as a helpful factor, as it ‘promot[es] the phase-out of non-recyclable single-use packaging’.
The city was also involved in a returnable cup test at participating Starbucks locations last year.
The City of Petaluma, Zero Waste Sonoma, Recology, and additional community groups and local businesses contributed to the public-private collaboration that has facilitated the Petaluma Reusable Cup Project.
“It takes an entire community to build the future of reuse that we want to see,” says Michael Kobori, chief sustainability officer at Starbucks. “Our environmental promise is core to our business and that’s why we’re working toward a future vision of every Starbucks beverage served in a reusable cup.
“Together with fellow foodservice brands, local stores and community stakeholders, we’re leading this initiative to help further unlock behaviour change toward reusables, making it easy for our customers, and any customer, to choose to reuse and reduce waste.”
Kate Daly, managing director and head of the Center for the Circular Economy at Closed Loop Partners, continues: “To create a world without packaging waste, we need to ensure that food packaging reuse systems are scaled in a way that creates a positive environmental impact––meeting the current needs of people while driving a cultural shift toward reuse.
“By testing reuse across an entire city in partnership with key stakeholders from the community and industry, we can scale reuse collaboratively through thoughtful experimentation, building a future where reuse is the norm.”
“The City of Petaluma is laying the groundwork to make cup reuse not only an option, but the default,” states Kevin McDonnell, the Mayor of the City of Petaluma. “We have an amazing, engaged community, and we look forward to assisting the success of this programme, alongside our local restaurants and participating global brands that service our community.”
“Imagine a neighborhood where all to-go cups are reusable, and returning these cups required no extra steps,” Leslie Lukacs, executive director of Zero Waste Sonoma, comments. “By making reusable cups as convenient and accessible as single use, we can offer an alternative for residents when they forget to bring their own cups with them.
“Universal accessibility creates the foundation for a cultural shift towards reuse.”
Brittany Gamez, COO & co-founder of Muuse, adds: “Transitioning to returnable packaging systems is a critical part of reducing single-use packaging waste, and we need to focus on supporting the operations behind it. These systems must be thoughtfully and responsibly implemented to ensure we are minimizing our impact of creating more waste in the process.
“It is through initiatives like this that we can identify what is needed to operationalize shared systems at this level and inform how reuse is implemented at scale.”
Project participant The Coca-Cola Company ran its own trials in the United States last summer, including a partnership with r.Cup to distribute reusable polypropylene cups at a range of venues in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, and Washington D.C. This was set to contribute to Coca-Cola’s World Without Waste global sustainable packaging strategy, in which it aims to serve 25% of its global product volume in reusable packaging by 2030.
Uber Eats and DeliverZero have also extended their partnership in April to offer reusable, returnable takeaway food packaging in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other areas on the West Coast of the United States. In doing so, they hoped to bring down carbon emissions and packaging waste.
Back in January, the municipality of Aarhus worked with TOMRA to pilot the ‘world’s first’ open-managed system for reusable takeaway packaging; the solution anticipated city-wide transitions away from single-use packaging. In its initial stage, the system was compatible with hot and cold drinks containers, such as takeaway coffee cups.
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