Reusable foodservice offerings make a return

In the first days of COVID-19, no one knew quite how the virus spread. The prospect of surface transmission led cafes and restaurants to suspend a growing number of reusable container programs, which were created to reduce how much one-time-use packaging ended up in the trash.

Now, as the panic wanes, a group of takeout food companies and logistics partners are once again trying to reduce waste in New York by encouraging or at least accepting reusable containers for coffee or sandwiches — and discovering renewed interest in their environmental goals. While most are focused on environmental impacts, others have a more immediate motivation: not running through their stash of disposable packaging before the disrupted supply chain can replenish their stores.

"At this time last year no one wanted to listen" to his pitch about reusables, said Michael Cyr, the co-founder of Cup Zero, which acts like Citi Bike for washable mugs at city coffee shops. "By February of this year, people said. 'Yeah, maybe.' Now COVID doesn't come up at all."

Americans used and disposed of 1.4 million tons of paper cups and plates and an additional 1 million tons of plastic foodservice containers, according to Environmental Protection Agency data. That figure is from 2018, the most recent year for which data is available. COVID-19 increased delivery orders by as much as 69 percent, a study from Columbia Business School found. That turned meals that would have been eaten at a restaurant on washable ceramic plates into delivery food packaged in a lot of paper and plastic.

Together, paper and plastic food packages accounted for around 1 percent of all materials and waste generation in 2018. But the mass of waste does not describe the full problem: The production and disposal of plastic was expected to add more than 850 million metric tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere in 2019, the same as the emissions from nearly 200 large coal power plants, said the Center for International Environmental Law, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental advocacy group.

To address the issue, a global shift toward reusables had been underway before the pandemic shutdowns.

Starbucks had an ambitious goal to cut its 2018 waste in half by 2030. New York City firms such as Just Salad and ThinkCoffee had likewise scaled up programs for bowls and cups that could be washed and refilled with lunches and drinks again and again.

But almost all shut the programs down in the spring of 2020, to protect customers and staff from getting COVID-19.

Starbucks had planned to double its use of reusable cups between 2016 and 2022. Because of the suspension of personal cup use for safety measures, just 1.3 percent of beverages sold were in reusable cups in 2020, according to the company's 2020 Global Environmental and Social Impact Report. In June of this year, it began allowing New Yorkers to get coffee in their personal cups again.

At Just Salad, sales of its $1 reusable bowl had doubled in 2019 over 2018. But the company halted the program in the spring of 2020, restarting it in early July. It took until this month for reusable bowl usage to return to pre-March 2020 levels, based on same-store data. The company is now working on a pilot at some stores in which customers can order online in reusable bowls and then drop them off later on at a store to be sanitized.

Cyr's Cup Zero just launched at the end of October at two Brooklyn locations of the coffee shop Little Skips. Customers who have the Cup Zero app can show the app to a barista to receive their drink in a reusable mug, which they can later return to any participating store listed on the app. Cyr said he has enough interest to scale quickly to 20 stores. At that level, eco-minded coffee drinkers would avoid throwing away 100,000 paper cups a year, Cyr said.

Lauren Sweeney is the co-founder of DeliverZero, a reusable container company that allows New Yorkers to order takeout in packaging that they can later return to be washed and reused. New Yorkers, she said, were willing to return to reusables not long after the company returned from its spring pause. As early as October of 2020, former fans were back in pre-pandemic numbers, especially those who had noticed that they were ordering more takeout than ever as they tried to support their favorite eateries without dining in, she said.

At Win Son Bakery in Brooklyn, the call to bring in reusable cups came on Instagram and struck a slightly different tone: Supply chain hiccups had made it hard for the company to buy enough single-use paper cups, and the operators wanted customers to bring in their own. Win Son did not respond to requests for more details.

Still, after two years of worry about viral transmission, not all coffee shops are willing to fill up a customer's cup.

Sweeney, who usually carries her own mug, said she had to seek out specific cafes she knew would fill her cup. ThinkCoffee, which had pioneered a reusable program similar to Just Salad's, has not yet relaunched it, although it has returned to offering a 25-cent discount for customers who bring in their own mugs.

Customers' habits have shifted too, with New Yorkers now so used to tossing their one-time-use face masks they might not notice the waste from their coffee orders.

"It feels like it has lowered on people's priority lists," said Jessamyn Ward Rodriguez, the general manager of Daily Provisions, which has encouraged reusable cups since its inception in 2017 but has not yet returned to filling them for customers.