More than 700,000 cups were returned here last year. Can deposit machines come to more European streets?
ADVERTISEMENTI slide a thick white plastic cup with a blue lid into the opening and proceed to follow the instructions written on the disposal machine.
Placing my credit card in the designated card area, the tingles tell me that in a few moments about five Danish kroner (7 cents) will be returned to my bank account.
In January 2023, the Danish city of Aarhus launched a three-year pilot project to reduce the number of disposable coffee cups. Instead of throwing them away, local residents can use waste disposal machines designed by Norwegian waste management company TOMRA.
“Through waste analysis, we found that 45 percent of the waste in Aarhus comes from takeaway packaging,” says Simon Smedegaard Rossau, Project Manager for Circular Packaging at Aarhus Municipality. “This finding was a turning point.”
A year later, Aarhus is now able to share its first results, with the hope that more cities will follow suit.
What’s different about the Aarhus reusable cup system?
Many European countries such as Romania, Denmark and Belgium have introduced deposit systems that allow people to return plastic or glass bottles and cans to certain machines in supermarket chains, where they are in turn rewarded with a small cashback.
The Aarhus system, however, is outdoors, and the machines are located in the main shopping streets.
The aim is to recycle very popular products such as glasses for cold or hot drinks which are used for only 15 minutes on average before they go to waste. “Only less than 2 percent of single-use plastic coffee cups are recycled worldwide,” says Rossau.
The pilot required more than just building the machines, deciding where to place them, and creating recyclable cups. Changing consumer behavior was a necessary step for the ‘reuse revolution’ to happen.
“Plastic convenience has been optimized for decades, and it is a strong force influencing consumer behavior. If the consumer has a choice between single-use and reusable plastics, the adoption rate would be low,” says Geir Saether, head of TOMRA Reuse.
How did Aarhus conquer the people?
In order to convince citizens, the initiative was initially supported by 45 cafes that agreed to sell drinks only in these cups, not giving consumers the choice to buy single-use plastic cups.
In the first weeks, the return rate was only about 25 percent and Rosau doubted that the system would take off. For reusable cups to be a better alternative to their disposable counterparts, they need to be recycled at least six times, achieving a recovery rate of 82 percent.
The turning point came during the city’s week-long Aarhus Uke festival in September, where retailers exclusively offered reusable cups at the event. Many more citizens were exposed to them, and about 100,000 cups were returned, which would fill 1,200 trash cans.
The event, Rossau says, was useful for changing behavior because it introduced a larger portion of the population to a new recyclable product.
“Now we see changes in behavior. We see people leaving with bags full of cups, which means they are recycled in bulk, like cans and bottles,” says Rosau. “Now we can see that the return rate is 88 percent, which means that the cup is reused 44 times.
ADVERTISEMENTHow many plastic cups were returned to Aarhus?
The pilot program set out to collect 500,000 cups in the first year, a goal that was far exceeded as the cups were returned 735,000 times, saving 14 tons of plastic from incineration and CO2 emissions.
For 2025, the goal is to collect 1.5 million cups, and an additional 1.5 million is planned for the third year. The plan is for the municipality of Aarhus to expand to several other nearby small towns, as well as to other forms of food packaging.
“We are included in the Danish national financial plan, because the policy makers recognize the scalability of the project,” says Rosau. The budget provides funds for a national partnership that brings together municipalities, businesses, restaurants and other interested parties.
If rolled out across the country, the project could significantly reduce the use of single-use takeaway packaging, which currently accounts for 500 million single-use items a year in Denmark.
ADVERTISEMENTAarhus is a medium-sized city, and scaling the model to larger cities, with more complex supply chains, presents different challenges and opportunities.
How is Europe fighting plastic waste?
“Aarhus is just the tip of the iceberg. We have seen great momentum in cities such as Barcelona, Berlin, Leuven, Ghent, Rotterdamand Paris are tackling the packaging waste crisis by strengthening their reuse systems,” says Nathan Dufour, reuse systems manager at Zero Waste Europe.
These actions support the EU’s wider waste reduction targets, within the recently approved framework Regulation on packaging and packaging waste (PPWR). The PPWR mandates that member states reduce packaging waste per capita by 5 percent by 2030, with further reductions by 2035 and 2040.
“Thanks to PPWR we finally have EU-wide targets for reusable packaging for takeaway, drinks, the quick service industry, postal delivery and many other segments,” says Dufour. But that is still not enough, he adds. “Cities have led the way where a range of regulations have failed, we need to support national goals.”
ADVERTISEMENTBroader legislative support is needed to ease the significant costs of starting and maintaining the city’s reusable packaging systems, as well as the logistical hurdles of cleaning and redistributing cups.
“The transition to reuse requires strong policy interventions such as levies, reuse targets and bans on single-use packaging,” says TOMRA’s Sæther.
The ban on single-use plastics has proven efficient but plastic production is expected to triple by 2060. “To level the playing field [to single use plastic]we have to take external costs, like pollution, into account through measures like a tax on single-use packaging,” he adds.
The role of policy makers will be crucial in determining the pace and success of this transition to make packaging reuse systems efficient and convenient for retailers and consumers.
ADVERTISEMENT“Circular changes do not happen by chance – they need to be supported by interventions that shape the behavior of both businesses and consumers. It’s as simple as providing incentives to choose sustainable options and penalizing wasteful practices,” concludes Sæther.
