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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

TerraCycle

Kroger Launches a Recycling Program in Partnership With TerraCycle

Grocery retailer Kroger announced today the launch of its Kroger Our Brands Recycling Program, an expansion of an earlier program developed in partnership with TerraCycle. The program aims to make it easier for consumers to recycle flexible plastic packaging. 

Flexible plastic packaging includes things like snack pouches, potato chip bags, packets of cheese, and frozen food pouches, among other items. While this particular type of packaging keeps food fresh, it’s also very difficult to recycle and not eligible for curbside pickup in most parts of the U.S.

TerraCycle, meanwhile, specializes in hard-to-recycle items such as flexible plastics. The company has several different recycling programs in operation, and also runs Loop, which offers common CPGs in reusable containers.

The Kroger/TerraCycle program means customers can sign up for free to ship them to TerraCycle using a prepaid shipping label. Users earn points for every pound of packaging sent. Points can be redeemed as donations to participating charitable organizations.

Having to take the extra steps to separate flexible plastics and actually put them in the mail might deter some customers. However, Kroger said in today’s press release that it saw “great success” with an earlier version of the program, which recycled flexible packaging from the company’s Simple Truth brand. The new program is available to schools, offices, and other organizations, in addition to individual consumers and households. 

All packaging collected through the program will be melted into hard plastic and used to make new products. 

For now, only the following Kroger brands are eligible to be recycled via the program: Private Selection, Kroger Brand, Comforts, Luvsome, and Abound. 

 

Burger King Partners with Loop to Pilot Reusable Packaging

Burger King announced today that it has partnered with TerraCyle’s circular packaging service, Loop, to test out the use of resuable food and beverage containers.

Starting next year, select BKs in New York City, Portland (the announcement didn’t specify Maine or Oregon) and Tokyo, will give consumers the option of getting their sandwiches, sodas and coffee in the reusable containers and cups. Customers opting for the reusable packaging are charged an undisclosed deposit upon purchase that is refunded when the containers are returned to a collection system at the restaurant. From there the containers will be picked up by Loop, cleaned and sanitized and reused by Burger King.

If this sounds fast food news sounds familiar, that’s because McDonald’s announced a similar partnership with Loop last month to trial reusable cups in the U.K. next year.

Both of these trials are good news as fast food giants like Mickey D’s and the BK Lounge are both sources of a lot of single-use packaging waste. Their involvement in the battle against waste will be important, as my colleague, Jenn Martson recently wrote:

Whether you love big restaurant chains or fear they’ll be the only ones left after the dust from the restaurant industry upheaval settles, it’s worth acknowledging that they’re typically the ones with the deep enough pockets to invest in new forms of to-go containers.

For people who care about waste and recycling, it should be noted that Loop continues to expand its services. In addition to Burger King and McDonald’s, Loop is broadening its CPG shopping service across the U.S. and its parent company, TerraCycle, is working with Hive’s just-launched online market.

This reusable container partnership with Loop also reinforces Burger King’s sustainability commitments, which include having 100 percent of its customer packaging be sourced from renewable, recycled or certified sources by 2025, and recycling of customer packaging in 100 percent of restaurants in Canada and the U.S. by 2025.

McDonald’s Partners With Loop to Pilot Reusable Packaging

With the restaurant industry currently being reinvented with to-go-first experiences in mind, there’s cause to worry that the shift will add even more single-use cups, straws, and boxes to our already bulging landfills. So it makes for a small silver lining that McDonald’s today announced a partnership with Terracycle’s zero-waste platform Loop to pilot a reusable cup model.

The program will first be trialed at select McDonald’s in the UK in 2021. For a small deposit, customers will get a reusable Loop cup for their hot beverages. The deposit can be redeemed by returning the cup to any participating McDonald’s location, according to today’s press release. Loop will retrieve the used cups, wash them, and return them to the cycle.

As to whether this reusable cup program will make its way to the States, a McDonald’s spokesperson said, “The feedback collected through these packaging trials will help inform which options are scaled up or adopted in other countries around the world.”

Loop’s main business lets customers shop online for grocery, household, and beauty products from well-known brands, then get them delivered in packaging. Living up to the platform’s name, Loop  retrieves and cleans the empty containers once a customer is finished, and the cycle starts again. The company currently has partnerships with Häagen-Dazs, Tropicana, Nature’s Path Organic, and several well-known personal care brands. The service is available in select U.S. cities and is in the process of expanding to more places, including international locations.

The McDonald’s partnership comes at a time when the fight for a more sustainable restaurant has to co-exist alongside the fight against COVID-19. Some chains, notably Starbucks, have banned reusable cups for the time being, (understandably) citing safety concerns. But the sustainability issue can’t be put on hold for long, particularly since the increase in to-go orders could eventually equal an alarming increase in trash, too.

Whether you love big restaurant chains or fear they’ll be the only ones left after the dust from the restaurant industry upheaval settles, it’s worth acknowledging that they’re typically the ones with the deep enough pockets to invest in new forms of to-go containers. For its part, McDonald’s has already piloted other circular solutions for cups, including the Recup system in Germany and the chain’s participation in the NextGen Cup Challenge in the U.S.

Earlier this year, the company also completed construction on its first “net zero energy-designed restaurant” in Florida. At the time of that news, I wrote that billion-plus-dollar restaurant chains like McDonald’s, Chipotle, etc. are the ones that need to take the lead in writing the playbook for sustainability in the restaurant. Smaller restaurants — the ones that have managed to survive the fallout — still struggle to remain open, so it seems unreasonable right now to ask them to also reinvent the paper cup. 

McDonald’s, on the other hand, has a $4 billion off-premises business and a recent track record that’s heavy on the innovation front. Using some of those dollars and resources to create a more sustainable restaurant experience seem the next logical step. 

Pepsi and Nestlé to Trial Reusable Containers in Effort to Ditch Plastic

This summer, a group of 25 big name brands including Pepsi, Nestlé and Procter & Gamble will test out a new program that sells products in reusable containers in an effort to combat rampant plastic waste, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The new program, dubbed Loop, will be run by recycling company, TerraCycle, and will kick off in May, starting with 5,000 shoppers in New York and Paris. From there it will branch out to more locations like London, Toronto and Tokyo over the next year.

Some examples of the new packaging include Pepsi selling Tropicana orange juice in glass bottles, and Häagen-Dazs putting its ice cream in steel containers. The Journal writes that prices for these products will be roughly the same as their plastic counterparts, but there will be a deposit of $1 – $10 per container (plus shipping). Shoppers order items through a website for home delivery and when they are done, schedule a pickup for the containers which will be cleaned and reused.

It’s always good to be skeptical of big brands whenever they appear to be making some kind of altruistic move–they are in business to make money, not save the planet. But this trial is coming at a time when people are waking up to just how much plastic waste we’re generating. National Geographic reports that 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic has been created over the past six decades and only 9 percent of it has been recycled. It gets worse, as U.S. plastic recycling was projected to decrease to just 4.4 percent last year.

The good news, though, is that a number of regulators, companies and startups are tackling the problem head on. Last year more than 60 countries introduced initiatives to ban single-use plastic. Companies like Starbucks and Disney and Hyatt are banning single use plastic straws. Vessel Works launched a reusable coffee cup program in Colorado. And zero waste grocery stores are starting to pop up.

Will all this activity move the needle for convenience-addicted shoppers (myself included) to ditch their old habits and try something new? The ease of buying the normal plastic containers will be a hard habit for a lot of people to break. Hopefully Pepsi, Nestlé and all the brands participating in this new trial will design a recycling program that works, stick with it and throw some of their considerable marketing muscle behind it to make it a success — and help make us move on from plastic.