POLYPROBLEM report: The Circularity Code

Turnaround in the to-go sector: all digital or nothing? THE ADDED VALUE OF REUSEABILITY Whether you’re getting a salad from the self-service salad bar at the supermarket or a latte from the coffee shop at the train station, grabbing a quick bite from a fast-food restaurant or having a pizza delivered to your home, disposable packaging for takeaway food and beverages is ubiquitous. The German take-away sector produces nearly 800 tons of waste from disposable packaging alone. Every day. And the legal obligation to offer reusable packaging by 2023 has not changed that. Young providers of reusable systems want to turn the tide from single-use to a culture of reusables. They, too, rely on digital solutions. They are called Recup, Relevo or Vytal, to name just the best known. They all share one basic idea: that restaurants and cafés should not be forced to buy their own containers for take-away use and set up their own takeback and cleaning structure. These reusable system providers supply the catering trade with containers for food and beverages and take care of the cleaning and resupplying. For the idea to work, it is crucial to have as large a possible network of partner businesses as possible because it is the only way to ensure consumers’ convenience of returning the containers not just where they got them from, but to any business within that specific reusable system. Recup5, for example, has more than 21,000 collection points. Operating such complex systems is hardly possible in a purely analog manner. Thus, the transformation to reusable packaging is also powered digitally. To be sure, all providers use digital technologies, albeit to varying degrees. Vytal6, headquartered in Cologne, Germany, has positioned itself as a particularly strong digital player. “The most important reason why we consistently rely on a digital solution is that it allows us to do without a conventional deposit-refund system,” explains Dr. Fabian Barthel, the company’s co-founder and managing director. Paying an analog deposit for reusable containers is a psychological hurdle for customers. If the charge is low, they have no incentive to return the containers quickly. If it is high, people are not willing to pay the money up front, Barthel explains. Barthel attributes the fact that Vytal’s purported return rate is over 99% to its full-on digital approach. Each container has an individual QR code. Users only register once in the company’s app. Vytal will then be able to account for where each container is at any given time. And consumers can use the app to see how many single-use plastic containers they have already saved by using reusable containers. The ReFrastructure7 foundation is skeptical that a handful of successful reusable systems will go far enough to make reusable to-go containers the new normal. It wants to establish a cross-provider data infrastructure that enables users to return their used containers “anywhere”, i.e., at return machines and return points both in public and private spaces. “Return anywhere” being the magic expression. “We see a future infrastructure for reusables as a social common good,” explains ReFrastructure’s managing director, Markus Urff. Urff does not want to eliminate competition among providers, but rather take it to a higher level through the shared digital infrastructure. “BMW, Mercedes, and VW did not build their own road infrastructure, they all use public roads. There is a 5 https://recup.de/ 6 https://www.vytal.org/ 7 https://refrastructure.org/ 24

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