Imagine you have just finished a delicious to-go meal or morning coffee, or used the last drop of moisturizer. Without thinking too hard, you may be ready to toss another container into the trash, adding to the 82 million tons of packaging waste generated in the U.S. each year. But have you ever wondered where that container came from, and where it’s going next?
We did.
Closed Loop Partners’ Center for Circular Economy teamed up with the Columbia Climate School’s Research Program on Sustainability Policy & Management to build a novel tool to rigorously assess the carbon emissions and cost implications of a wide range of single-use and reusable packaging designs.
The Center, an innovation hub that works with leading consumer goods companies and retailers to reinvent packaging and recovery systems to reduce waste, now uses the tool’s comprehensive metrics and insights to guide the deployment and optimization of more sustainable packaging systems. For example, in Petaluma, the NextGen Consortium—an industry collaboration managed by the Center—launched the Petaluma Reusable Cup Project, a citywide reuse initiative in collaboration with global food and beverage brands and local city government (see the in-depth report here or watch a summary here).
In Petaluma, reusable cups were made the default option across a citywide network of restaurants and coffee shops. Following a system designed by the NextGen Consortium, customers dropped used cups into dedicated purple reuse bins across the city, and the cups were then picked up and washed at a central facility before being redistributed to be used again. While this project focused on cups, the assessment tool was designed to be flexible and customizable to a wide range of single or multi-use packaging shapes, materials and market applications, such as lunch bowls or even household products. Throughout the project, the tool helped the Center answer questions such as:
- What are the carbon and cost impacts of collecting and washing reusable packaging?
- How does switching from vans to e-bikes for local collection affect emissions?
- Is it more efficient to operate a small, nearby washing facility or a centralized, high-speed one further away?
- Which materials and design features offer the best environmental and economic performance?
- And most critically: how often would customers have to return the reusable—and usually heavier—packaging to be better for the environment than the more light-weight, single-use alternative?
Leveraging insights from the tool, the Center designed an easy and pleasant consumer experience to drive return motivation, while engineering the lightest possible environmental footprint to offset those containers that eventually reach recycling or landfill facilities.
The design of the packaging itself was a major component. Even after accounting for the recycling rates of each material, we found that traditional designs of reusable packaging simply used too much raw material from the start. To “beat” their lighter, single-use counterparts in terms of environmental and cost impact, traditional reusable packaging needs to be reused far more often than is realistic. However, since reusable cups are often thrown away or hoarded unused, the plausible, typical number of uses is much smaller than their theoretical “factory-guaranteed” lifespan.
To address these challenges, the Petaluma Reusable Cup Project deployed a novel cup design and manufacturing process that yields sturdy, easy-to-wash cups that required substantially less raw material than traditional reusables. If such cups were used about twice on average—in other words, only about 50 percent of all customers actually returned them—they were already better for the environment than the single-use alternative. The Petaluma project did achieve 50-percent return rates, and future improvements to the program will only increase this rate and lower environmental impacts, such as plastic pollution.
While reuse systems require thoughtful design and measurement, the hidden impacts of single-use packaging are often underestimated in many assessments. Take the example of Manhattan: When you throw away a single-use container—whether a paper cup, takeout container or pill bottle—it travels an average of 120 miles, zigzagging through the streets on a garbage truck, and then another several hundreds of miles on barges, trains and long-haul trucks, all the while contributing to carbon dioxide emissions, until reaching its final destination, a landfill. Bacteria will then go to work on the leftover food or other biodegradable content, contributing to the emission of methane, a greenhouse gas even worse than carbon dioxide.
This level of detail in our tool—capturing not just raw material, extraction and transportation but the impacts of cup design, manufacturing, recycling, washing and landfilling—goes far beyond previous studies. This more granular analysis was the reason why the minimum number of reuses required for the reusable version to be “greener” than the single-use alternative came down substantially—from the dozens of reuses often cited in previous studies to just two reuses in the project in Petaluma.
What did we learn? Academia provides powerful methodologies—from life cycle assessments and circular economy frameworks to calculations for quantifying the rate of methane production in landfills. But academia partnering with private and public entities to infuse these methodologies with real-world data, and using the results as a guide to design and build circular systems at scale, is critical to achieve on the ground impact. This is just the beginning of a big transition, and reuse is one critical part of the solution. Done right, and with reliable data and tools backing it, reuse systems offer a powerful path forward for cutting emissions, reducing waste and keeping valuable materials in play.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Columbia Climate School, Earth Institute or Columbia University.