In the city of Petaluma, California, just north of San Francisco, more than 30 chain restaurants and locally owned coffeehouses and eateries have banded together on a first-of-its-kind effort to reduce single-use plastic.
It's a three month pilot program called the Petaluma Reusable Cup Project, during which dozens of outlets will serve drinks in reusable plastic cups. Instead of chucking their cup in a bin, customers can return it to any participating establishments - which range from Starbucks to KFC to Dunkin' and local pie shops - or place it in one of 60 receptacles around Petaluma. From there, it’ll get washed and returned for reuse.
While venues like sports stadiums and concert halls have already deployed such reuse programs, Joseph Winters writing for grist.org notes, “no other citywide program in the U.S. has made reusable cups the default option across so many different foodservice brands.”
The project aims to achieve an “unprecedented saturation of reusable packaging” within Petaluma. Thanks to funding from the NextGen Consortium - founded by Starbucks and McDonald’s and supported by companies including PepsiCo and Coca-Cola - hundreds of thousands of reusable cups will be deployed throughout the city in preparation for the program’s August 5 start date.
But, you may be thinking, why not just recycle the cups? Well, the U.S. churns out nearly 40 million metric tons of plastic waste annually, yet recycles just a paltry 5 percent of it. So the best way to reduce that waste, and avoid the carbon emissions created by manufacturing new plastic, is to avoid using more plastic in the first place.
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