The Californian city of Petaluma experimented with working with nearby eateries to establish a citywide return-and-reuse beverage cup program.
The plan at the time was a three-month study, and the results are in. A home run was hit. The initiative, which included local mom-and-pop shops and big chains like Starbucks and Taco Bell, made sure that consumers would not be charged extra for reusable cups.
Instead, they were simply requested to place their cup in one of the several purple bins located throughout the city center.
Ashley Harris, manager of the Coffee & Tea Company’s Petaluma location, declared, “I think this was a very exciting thing to be part of to be the only city in the country to do this.”
The program was created by the Center for the Circular Economy at the investment firm Closed Loop Partners with the goal of reducing the 50 billion disposable drink cups that Americans consume each day.
Muuse, a local company, was hired by NextGen Consortium, the program’s organizers, to collect, clean, and distribute the cups.
“I really liked it. There were a million places where you could put the cup back,” resident Kadi Newlan stated.
In the 60,000-person city, more than 220,000 cups were used and returned, per a NextGen study. For instance, customers could carry the cup about and use it like a reusable coffee cup, and they were not obliged to return it right away after using it for the first time.
With a vibrant purple exterior, the cups could be easily picked out of waste streams in case someone tossed them in with the normal garbage or recycling.
The bins, advertisements, cups, and stations inside restaurants all shared the same color to help connect the infrastructure in people’s minds.
And this greatly aided the project. The proprietor of a nearby ice cream and slushie business, Once Upon A Slush, noted that 83% of customers were aware of the program’s existence, 88% of them knew how to return the cup, and 80% of them wanted it to continue, according to a report by NextGen Consortium.
“We haven’t seen that level of community engagement, awareness, understanding, satisfaction, and pride. Petaluma was very proud of the project,” Carolina Lobel, senior director at the Center for the Circular Economy stated.
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The Center and Consortium must decide how to use the information now that the experiment is ended and the majority of Petalumans are returning to utilizing either their own reusable cups or disposable ones.
Harris and other business leaders in Petaluma want to see the project become permanent, so Lobel said they are looking into ways to accomplish it, including transferring the materials and expertise to private partners.
