‘Sip, return, repeat’: How this California city is trying to normalize reusable cups

Next month, more than 30 chain restaurants and locally owned coffee shops and eateries in Petaluma, California, will begin providing beverages in reusable cups by default as part of a first-of-its-kind pilot program meant to reduce pollution from single-use plastic.

Through the Petaluma Reusable Cup Project — a three-month pilot program sponsored by a food and beverage industry group called the NextGen Consortium — customers will be served hot and cold beverages in bright purple reusable plastic cups, unless they ask for disposables or bring their own mugs. After drinking their coffees, teas, or sodas, they’ll be able to return the cups at any of the participating establishments, or at one of 60 return receptacles placed strategically throughout the city.

A reuse logistics provider, Muuse, will be in charge of collecting, washing, and redistributing the clean cups back to the coffee shops and restaurants.

Kate Daly, managing director of the impact investment firm Closed Loop Partners — which oversees the NextGen Consortium — said the program will be a major milestone. Existing reusable cup programs tend to operate in sports stadiums, concert halls, and other confined spaces where it’s easier to keep track of inventory. No other citywide program in the U.S. has made reusable cups the default option across so many different foodservice brands.

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The project aims to achieve an “unprecedented saturation of reusable packaging” within Petaluma, Daly told Grist. Thanks to funding from the NextGen Consortium — founded by Starbucks and McDonald’s and supported by companies including PepsiCo and Coca-Cola — she said hundreds of thousands of reusable cups will be deployed throughout the city in preparation for the program’s August 5 start date.

Participating locations will include Starbucks, Peet’s Coffee, Dunkin’, KFC, and The Habit Burger Grill, as well as local cafes and restaurants like the Petaluma Pie Company and Tea Room Cafe. Closed Loop Partners said they selected Petaluma — a city of about 60,000 people just north of San Francisco — because of its dense, walkable downtown, and because of residents’ receptivity to reuse programs. Many people may have grown familiar with reuse last year, when Starbucks tested a smaller-scale reusable cup program at 12 locations between Petaluma and another city nearby.

Although the new program is confined to Petaluma and will only last three months, it could help inform initiatives in other cities that are seeking to do away with single-use plastic packaging, the overwhelming majority of which is made from fossil fuels. The U.S. produces close to 40 million metric tons of plastic waste every year and recycles only 5 percent of it; the rest gets sent to landfills or incinerators, or ends up as litter.