TerraCycle is a waste management company that partnered up with 25 international brands to provide a system for delivering common consumer products in refillable containers.
Customers place their orders via a website and receive them at their door, within a reusable tote. When the cereals, detergent or ice-cream has been used up, the customer just places the empty containers in their tote. The containers are collected, cleaned, refilled and returned by the company.
The project, Loop, is launched on pilot mode in May 2019 in France and USA, planning to soon expand to London, Tokyo, Toronto and San Francisco. Customers can sign-up at the Loop website.
Loop aspires to move from having a dedicated retail website to being integrated in existing online platforms, and eventually popularize the trend to have products in reusable packaging appear in mainstream supermarkets. There is a wide range of common-use, popular-brand items on offer—even diapers are brought in refillable containers and used diapers are accepted back for recycling.
This reflects the increasing concerns towards waste management and the influential movement away from single-use plastic packaging. There is an increasing trend for using refillable containers, zero-waste supermarkets and provision of relevant services. France recently saw the first zero-waste drive-through supermarket, Drive tout nu. The return of the milkman is expanding from dairy to beer and laundry detergent.
I have been following the Drive tout nu (“stark naked drive”) experiment, a bit expensive though, and a very limited choice but that’s a start. I suspect this kind of reusable container infrastructure will have more success when it’s part of regular delivery stores, like Safeway, rather than small hipster startup company that will never be able to compete on this market. I can already buy some stuff in bulk at the grocery store, I hope this will develop even more.
And if I may make a suggestion to this Loop company: Use square containers, not space-wasting cylinders.I don’t have a fifth of the space available to store the huge cashew nuts and other containers in the video.
What I would really like to see is more progress on the fresh food packaging, like meat or cheese, that still use a lot of polystyrene foam and plastic wrap, that are not only non-recyclable, but also come straight from the petroleum industry, we need better alternatives.