By Meg Wilcox for Civil Eats.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for Commonwealth News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
At Johnny’s Luncheonette, a family-style diner in the greater Boston area serving sandwiches and breakfast all day, customers can take their meal to go in a lime-green, durable plastic container that is borrowed like a library book and designed to be reused hundreds, if not thousands, of times by other restaurant patrons.
Customers don’t pay extra for the reusable take-out box. They simply need to download an app called Recirclable, and—to avoid paying a $15 fee—return the container within two weeks to one of 14 restaurants participating in Recirclable’s reuse program.
Johnny’s Luncheonette is among a small but growing number of restaurants taking steps to move away from single-use plastic take-out containers, which usually end up in the trash because they can’t be recycled. Worse yet, mismanaged plastic waste eventually enters the oceans, where it kills sea creatures that ingest it and breaks apart into toxic microplastics the size of a lentil or smaller.
Restaurants and food services use nearly 1 trillion pieces of disposable food service ware and packaging annually in the U.S., according to Upstream, a reuse advocacy organization.
Johnny’s Luncheonette began offering the reusable take-out containers earlier this year because its owner, Kay Masterson, was tired of the Sisyphean search for an environmentally friendly disposable take-out box. “Ideas like Recirclable are a much better option because it takes out the conversation of, ‘Well, which takeout container is less bad?’” she said. “Reuse is just smart. It’s smart resource-wise. It’s smart cost-wise.”
Masterson pays more per piece for the reusable packaging but said that she expects costs will drop below disposable packaging as more customers use the service. Thus far, only dozens of customers have selected the reusable option.
Many case studies show that while reusable containers cost more upfront, businesses start to save fairly quickly. What’s more, “It’s not just about saving money but about building resiliency so that you have shorter supply chains without so much global dependency,” said Elizabeth Balkan, director of Reloop America, at Reloop, a nonprofit operating in both Europe and the U.S.
Moving from single use to reuse is one of the biggest opportunities for reducing plastic pollution, according to a report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a reuse pioneer. Reuse services targeting food businesses are growing quickly in the U.S., especially for arenas and stadiums, colleges and K-12 schools, corporate offices, and other institutions.
Startups offering logistics and dishwashing are proliferating, as are nonprofit organizations providing strategic support, funding, and advocacy. But reuse is still far from the norm in the U.S. Communities need shared reuse infrastructure for the practice to pick up steam, according to Crystal Dreisbach, CEO of Upstream. Cohesive, city-scale systems could help shift consumer habits and increase the volume of materials being reused, which is essential for both economic and environmental impact. Enabling policies would hasten the transition.
“You can’t have consumers running all over town, dropping off things in [different] places. You’re going to need big infrastructure that will accommodate this massive systemic change away from disposable to reusable,” Dreisbach said.
Reuse on the Rise
Reuse services are emerging in cities across the country, from the Bay Area to Brooklyn. Startups like Vessel and Turn Systems offer customers a reusable cup option at the point of sale that can be returned at kiosks or bins. DeliverZero provides reusable take-out containers at some 150 restaurants in New York City, Boulder, Colorado, and California, and at Whole Foods stores in Boulder. Usefull offers stainless steel containers on college campuses. Bold Reuse services large venues in Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Kansas City, and Phoenix, while Dispatch Goods in San Francisco and ReUso in Chicago serve restaurants and institutions.
Dishwashing and sanitizing systems are also emerging, since they’re key to any reuse system. Restaurants handle their own dishwashing in Recirclable’s system. Other reuse companies provide dishwashing, including via mobile units at large venues, or contract it out to large washing stations like Re:Dish, which operates in New York City and Philadelphia and is equipped with technologies for tracking and sorting packaging.
ReThink Disposable provides free reuse consulting to restaurants, institutions, and large venues in Minnesota, California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New England. The nonprofit also raises funding to buy reusable packaging and/or install dishwashers at restaurants and food delivery programs run by nonprofits, such as Truro Community Kitchen.
Reusable containers come in ceramic, glass, stainless steel, and plastic, depending on the venue, but, for takeout, “most restaurant owners prefer durable, No. 5 plastic [polypropylene type] because they store and stack easily,” are lightweight, and can be microwaved, said Amber Schmidt, New England zero-waste specialist at ReThink Disposable.
While “reusable plastic may be an imperfect solution, it is still a critically important step in the right direction,” toward an overall reduction in plastic packaging, Balkan said.
Volume Is Key
Recirclable was co-founded in 2021 by Margie Bell, who worked for decades on ecommerce and point-of-sale applications in the software industry. “Our vision was, ‘Let’s have this happening at every restaurant and, like library books, you borrow at one and you return to another.’”
Recirclable’s volume is small. Its users are dedicated customers who follow it from restaurant to restaurant, Bell told Civil Eats. “We’re in the thousands—and we’d love to be in the tens and hundreds of thousands—but we have to grow the network” of restaurants.
“The biggest hurdle with Recirclable is just getting the word out there and changing habits,” said Masterson.
Recirclable’s small network of restaurants also limits its growth. Customers must live near a restaurant where they can return the container, or the system doesn’t work for them. The number of steps required is another barrier. Johnny’s Luncheonette Manager David Martinez said that when some interested people learn they have to download an app and put in their credit card, they decline.
“We recognize that can cause friction,” said Bell, who won an award from the EPA to develop a new system, launching this year, that will be accessed with one tap of a credit card.
Recirclable is not alone in having difficulty reaching volume—“the cornerstone” of reuse, Dreisbach said. “You cannot make the system work, you cannot make the economics work, until you have volume.”
Re:Dish’s washing station in Brooklyn, for example, can handle 75,000 reusables daily, but “we’re not anywhere near there right now,” CEO and founder Caroline Vanderlip told Civil Eats. Re:Dish is on track to handle 4.5 million containers this year, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the trillion pieces of packaging used in the food sector, she said.
Transformational Change
To scale up reuse, Dreisbach envisions municipal waste and recycling centers becoming reuse centers. Reuse represents “a really cool new revenue stream” for recycling facilities, which struggle with volatility in recovered materials markets, she said.
Private investment, government funding—including from the Inflation Reduction Act—and forward service contracts with large anchor clients such as arenas could support such infrastructure development. The nonprofit Perpetual, in fact, is now working to design and implement city-scale reusable food service ware solutions in collaboration with Ann Arbor, Michigan; Hilo, Hawaii; Galveston, Texas; and Savannah, Georgia.
Laws mandating reuse would hasten the transition, as they have in Europe, where reuse is more widespread, Balkan told Civil Eats. Oregon, California, and Maine have passed laws moving in this direction that will raise funds for reuse, she said.
But big consumer brands also need to lead the way on shaping consumer attitudes about reuse, said Driesbach. “They have a great deal of power to decide what that packaging is,” she said, adding that consumers are ready for reuse. “COVID really showed us what appeared in our trash cans at home because we were all getting takeout. Awareness about trash has increased hugely in the last five years.”
Meg Wilcox wrote this article for Civil Eats.
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By Claire Elise Thompson for Grist.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for New Hampshire News Connection, reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
At a library in Dover, New Hampshire, earlier this year, the shelves of books and CDs typically available for lending were accompanied by something else - racks of clothes. Every Sunday and Monday from December through mid-January, community members could visit a lecture hall in the Dover Public Library to participate in the pilot of a new type of lending project: a clothing library. Visitors could check out up to five garments for two weeks at a time. The collection focused on "occasion wear," the types of things people might buy for the purpose of wearing once: a holiday party dress, a wedding outfit, a ski trip ensemble.
But more than displacing those types of purchases, and the resulting waste, the real idea behind the project was to facilitate a shift in behavior, said Stella Martinez McShera, the clothing library's creator. "How can we bridge the gap between people buying, whether that's new or secondhand, to borrowing?"
I met McShera while reporting another newsletter story on the world's first degrowth master's program, run by a university in Barcelona. She's a recent graduate of the online master's, and the clothing library was her thesis project. In that story, we explored what happens when the philosophical ideas of a new economic system meet the realities of the one we have. McShera's project is one example of what that looks like in practice.
McShera started her career in fashion. In 2000, she launched the first fashion incubator in the U.S. But as much as she loved the essence of fashion, she knew that the industry was guilty of horrifying human rights abuses, pollution, and waste. She had long been interested in circular fashion, but she came to feel that even a circular approach was not enough to get to the root of all the ills associated with fast fashion. When she discovered degrowth and the master's program, it became a proving ground for her ideas about replacing fast fashion and extraction with borrowing and being resourceful with what already exists.
McShera started building her clothing library pilot by collecting surplus garments from local thrift and vintage stores. It's estimated that thrift stores sell only about 20 percent of the donated clothing they receive. Even vintage boutiques and curated consignment shops will end up getting rid of some garments they weren't able to sell in a set time. "They have to cycle stuff in," she said. "So even if it's something really cute, maybe they overpriced it at the thrift store, or maybe it just didn't sell in two weeks because it's a sweater and it's unseasonably warm."
Just from local secondhand shops, McShera quickly gathered over 5,000 garments - even more than she could take, she said. She donated her own surplus to a housing shelter, winnowing the library collection down to about 1,500 items.
McShera kicked off the launch with a fashion show in the stacks. Professionally coiffed librarians modeled items from the collection for photographers and a crowd of over 160 attendees. "It was so much fun," said Denise LaFrance, the Dover library's director. The fashion show was the biggest indoor event at the library in her 25-year tenure. "I mean, seriously, people still are talking about it."
During the pilot, McShera also hosted an eco-fashion panel and three workshops on mending and styling, intended to help people think differently about their relationship to their wardrobes. "Because it's free, people were more willing to experiment with their style," McShera said. There was no guilt or shame associated with returning something, because returning was an understood part of the process.
LaFrance borrowed, among other things, a pair of gray silk pants that she remembered loving, even though they weren't the type of thing she would typically shop for. When she checked them out, they still had their original price tag attached. They retailed for about $400. "I would never buy $400 pants," she said. "But they were fabulous."
Over just 12 days of being open, McShera said, the library saw over a hundred people come through, and 65 borrowed something. And of the more than 100 garments that were checked out during the library's pilot, all of them came back clean and in good condition.
"It's the commoning of clothing," McShera said. "It's free access versus ownership."
With the pilot concluded, and McShera's thesis complete, she's now looking toward the next steps of bringing clothing libraries to fruition in her community and beyond. She presented the concept at the 10th International Degrowth Conference last week in Spain, and plans to publish a manual that will empower community members all over the world to start their own projects, in partnership with their local libraries. Someday, she'd like to see a network of clothing libraries - sharing resources and knowledge, advocating for policy change, and possibly even swapping clothes to help keep their collections fresh.
Although she feels there's more testing to be done, a few more local libraries in her area have already expressed interest in hosting a pilot, she noted.
"The most difficult thing about this was space and time," said LaFrance. The library is in an old building, she said, "and we're kind of bursting at the seams." She suspects that most libraries would be similarly pressed to carve out space for a small shop's worth of clothing racks. One thing she suggested to McShera was a setup more like a traveling bus.
But McShera's ultimate vision is to integrate clothing into the normal functioning of a library. "The reason I wanted the model to be in partnership with the public libraries is because the behavior's normal. People already know, I go in and I borrow," she said. She added that libraries tend to be centrally located in cities and neighborhoods, highly visible and easily reachable by foot or transit. And many libraries - including Dover's - already branch out from books, lending things like tools, games, and music.
"This just seems like a logical next step," she said.
Rather than a pop-up in an event room, she envisions a future where clothing racks could find a permanent home in the library. There could even be regular staff members with fashion expertise who could steward the collections. "Just like if someone needs help using the photocopier or help researching something, you ask the librarian for help," McShera said. "So if you wanted some help styling, you could say, 'Hey, is there a clothing librarian on shift today?'"
Claire Elise Thompson wrote this article for Grist.
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