🥤 This City Pays Residents to Return Plastic Coffee Cups
Managing Waste Through Cash Incentive
Today’s eco snapshot👇🏽
This City Pays Residents to Return Plastic Coffee Cups
Startup of the Week: RE-ZIP
5 Sustainable Brands I Recently Discovered
News That Lifted My Spirits This Week
3 Ways I Can Support Your Sustainability Journey
🥤 This City Pays Residents to Return Plastic Coffee Cups
Three years ago, the Danish city of Aarhus introduced a simple program: paying people to return their takeaway coffee cups.
A waste analysis by the city council revealed that most of the waste in the city came from takeaway packaging. So, it decided to launch a circular packaging program to solve the problem.
The program, run in collaboration with REUSEABLE, started with 45 cafes around the city. These local cafes were given thick plastic coffee cups and lids that were reusable. Consumers who would buy their drinks from these cafes would be served in these cups.
On the other hand, depositories were set up around the city in popular shopping areas and places that had a lot of coffee shops. Consumers can put these empty cups back in the depositories and get €70-cent rebates in return. These cups would then be cleaned and put back into the system.
“We now see shifts in behavior. We see people going with bags full of cups, which means they recycle in bulk, like for cans and bottles,” says Rossau. “Now we can see the return rate is 88% which means a cup is reused 44 times.”
The results:
Residents have reused more than 700,000 cups.
They have earnt over €514,000 in small rebates.
This saved 14 metric tons of plastic.
88% of cups are returned and reused an average of 44 times.
The program also ran during a week-long festival where people returned 100,000 cups, enough to fill 1,200 trash bins. The plan is to extend this to nearby areas and include other kinds of food and beverage packaging in the program.
⌛ Time for the quiz of the week
Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉
✨ Startup of the Week: RE-ZIP
This startup offers an innovative solution to end single-use packaging and challenge the throw-away culture.
Brown menace…What do you do with your cardboard boxes from online orders? Give them to your cat? They'll only be interested for a day. Maybe you flatten them for recycling—that's the responsible thing to do. But recycling isn't guaranteed. If the box is soiled or has tape on it, that's enough to get it rejected. Then, it ends up in a landfill.
RE-ZIP is solving this problem through its circular packaging option. This is how it works:
While shopping online, you can choose circular packaging at checkout.
After delivery, you can fold the packaging in a convenient return format.
And then drop it off at the nearest Drop Point, which can be located using the RE-ZIP app.
Check out the video below to see how RE-ZIP works:
Rinse and repeat…The packaging is then reused for another delivery, and customers earn rewards for participating. This cycle can repeat up to 10 times. According to RE-ZIP, this reduces:
CO2e emissions by 80%.
Water consumption by 89%.
Wood consumption by 93%.
Helping us move to a more sustainable future.
✅ 5 Sustainable Brands I Recently Discovered
Open Funk: A kitchen blender that is repairable, upgradable & is compatible with glass jars that you already have at home.
Waste X: Helping farmers earn extra income by transforming their agricultural waste into a valuable product.
EatCloud: Connecting restaurants & stores with food banks to prevent food waste.
HIVED: A 100% electric courier service that makes your online shopping kinder to the planet.
Earthletica: Uses old water bottles and fishing nets to make activewear products.
😹 News That Lifted My Spirits This Week
🌬️ Clean Air Cheer: London's expanded ultra low emission zone (Ulez) has led to a significant drop in deadly pollutants across the city. The improvements are particularly notable in the capital's most deprived areas, where residents are now breathing much cleaner air.
🔧 Higher Efficiency: MIT engineers have developed a groundbreaking aluminum recycling technology using a specialized ceramic nanofiltration membrane that can capture aluminum ions from industrial waste. This innovative method promises to make aluminum recycling more efficient while reducing hazardous waste and polluting byproducts.
🦌 I’m Coming Home: In a remarkable conservation effort, 17 mountain bongo antelopes are making their way back home to Kenya from Florida. This repatriation is part of the Kenyan government's ambitious initiative to save these rare, endemic antelopes by gathering them from zoos and conservancies worldwide to restore their population in their natural habitat.
💁🏼 3 Ways I Can Support Your Sustainability Journey
If you’re a planet-friendly brand, I can help you with your blogs, newsletters, case studies, and whitepapers. Here’s some of my recent work
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Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend, and see you next week :)