The reusable shopping platform, which launched with big hype and is now eyeing retail, has already raised one key question in its early days: What are the true costs of convenience? Tom Szaky, CEO of recycling company Terracycle, firmly believes that ditching disposable packaging doesn’t have to mean disposing of its benefits. Affordability, mainstream selection, "having the cool, new thing," and, most of all, convenience, are all elements of modern retail Szaky feels can be preserved in a package-free economy. Brands, he believes, just need the right model. In May, Terracycle launched a venture in circular economy shopping called Loop, bringing mainstream food and personal care products to consumers’ doorsteps in reusable, refillable packaging. The products come from some of the world’s biggest plastic polluters as defined by a 2018 Greenpeace audit across six continents. The idea has been to even out a skewed playing field between disposable and reusable packaging options, turning the complicated process of refilling and returning empty containers into a simple, one-click act. Since the launch, Loop has been hailed as a new take on "the milkman," a nostalgic reference to the dairy industry’s unique, circular model of distribution that once had so much consumer buy-in across the United States. Yet far from the simple routes of the neighborhood milkman, Loop is reverse engineering circularity onto products and supply chains designed for recycling or disposability. Its direct-to-consumer trial has been a virtuosic case study in marketing and reverse logistics. But the pilot – the object of much hype in the last six months, with a reported waitlist of 85,000 – was never designed to exceed 5,000 households in North America and another 5,000 in France. The company is planning to launch a more integrated approach and expand into multiple new countries next year. And while TerraCycle says it is too early to know how these pilots will perform, many in the recycling sector are curious to see just how disruptive this concept might be. The experiment, as it has unfolded until now, begs a pressing question: What are the true environmental and logistical costs of convenience? Rethinking convenience Szaky has good reason to want to bring convenience to a niche, package-free market. Currently, it’s in short supply. Catherine Conway, a package-free consultant based in the U.K., said she has found one of the main challenges for this form of shopping to be the behavior change it asks of consumers. Her business Unpackaged targets waste by reinventing stores’ bulk aisles to encourage reuse and refill with bring-your-own containers. "For the last 30 or 40 years, consumers have been told that all they should care about is convenience and price. So currently all they care about is convenience and price," explained Conway in an interview with Waste Dive. "You’ve now got to get across the message of why it’s going to be a bit inconvenient for them." This, she says, is why package-free shopping has remained on the fringes of retail. Many are put off by the limited offerings available in bulk, or simply aren’t willing to perform the extra work it entails. "I think there’s a lot of misconceptions out there about the number of hoops a consumer will jump through in the name of more sustainable packaging," Adam Gendell, associate director of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC), told Waste Dive. After all, any system is only as good as the number of people who will actually use it, and most people will only use it if it’s easy for them to do so. Gendell lauded the "milkman style" distribution model that Loop has adopted, where little is asked of consumers and the company is "not asking people to take 20 steps to get the package back" but instead "saying 'Here’s your reusable package, please get the stuff out of it, put it back outside, and forget about it.'" For shoppers, Loop’s direct-to-consumer model appears to do just that. The only behavior change required is to place used containers back in the Loop tote and schedule a pick-up online. Customers are incentivized to perform this last step because they have put down fully refundable container deposits on each item (a requisite for participation in the service), though these can be quite high. In her review of the service, Supply Chain Dive’s Emma Cosgrove commented that in addition to some products being more expensive – Loop’s dry black beans, for example, were 60% more than a bulk price in a grocery store – the deposits were cause for some sticker shock. "On my first order," she wrote, "I paid $30.50 in deposits including the $15.00 deposit for the shipping box – 23% of my total order." For brands, who also put hefty down payments and investment in new packaging to participate, Loop acts as an accommodating plug-in to a relatively hands-off reusable model. "Everything we do is always as a third party," said Benjamin Weir, Loop’s North America program manager, in an interview. The company's first task is working with brands to develop and test reusable packaging for each product. This can be simpler when brands request a "stock" container (a glass jar or an aluminum tin). It can get more complicated when they require customization, like in the case of the Häagen-Dazs stainless steel container or the Crest glass mouthwash bottle designed in conjunction with Kohler, featuring a silicone sleeve and a stainless steel cap. Once packaging is selected, a sanitation system is determined and then audited by brands. Loop outsources this portion of its work to specialized vendors at a cleaning facility located in Pennsylvania. It’s a learning curve, Weir told Waste Dive, as vendors providing sanitation services typically clean medical-grade equipment or aerospace parts – products far too valuable to dispose of after a single-use. For Loop’s purposes, they must be trained to clean consumer product-sized goods. In addition to cleaning services, Loop also provides brands with fulfillment – not to be confused with product refilling – at a warehouse in New Jersey, where orders of Loop totes are packed and prepared for delivery. These warehousing services are also outsourced. Finally, once the orders are prepared, totes are delivered to shoppers’ homes by UPS, the carrier Loop has partnered with for logistics. Balancing sustainability with availability Preserving ease-of-use for brands and consumers doesn’t come easy. The dairy industry to which Loop is so often compared enjoyed the luxury of managing just one product, produced and distributed regionally, with a standard package that had been designed with reusability and sanitation in mind from the very start. Production, cleaning, fulfillment and distribution all happened in the same place and dairy farms had relative control over their local supply chains. And milk, a product consumed regularly, was delivered on a "subscription" basis making the demand for refills constant and stable. Loop enjoys almost none of those advantages. The pilot offers 123 products on its website featuring over a dozen different types of packaging, each with its own distinct sanitization process. And being a third party means that, while Loop is responsible for sanitation of containers in regional warehouses, refilling remains in the hands of manufacturers located throughout the country. Nestlé, who is trialing Häagen-Dazs ice cream with Loop, told CNN they’re trucking refills of product from California to the East Coast. The winding reverse logistics for products that are – unlike the milkman – not locally sourced have caused some to question whether the additional impacts aren't nullifying any sustainability goals. "Loop is trying to minimize waste, but does that process still take into account the emissions to take that product back and reuse it and wash it and reprocess it and send it back out?" queried Alexis Bateman, director of the Sustainable Supply Chains program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an interview with Waste Dive. "I think that overvaluing one impact over another is usually the pitfall that these kinds of solutions come into." Weir said Loop is aware of some of the environmental impacts posed by adding mileage to the supply chain and using higher grade materials. "We’ve always said that this system is not always designed to service a large quantity of households. You’ll never see more than 5,000 households in our system right now, as is," he said. Working with the consulting firm Long Trail Sustainability, Loop has performed life cycle analyses (LCA) on all of its packaging to determine the cradle-to-grave environmental impacts. Rick Zultner, Loop's vice president of research and development, told Waste Dive these assessments showed that at 10 reuse cycles, the Loop e-commerce trial had a 35% reduction in global warming potential as compared to a "similar model." "The Loop system is very proficient at solving the waste problem, but we have to think beyond that," said Weir. "We have to think about the sustainability of the entire ecosystem and whether we are creating new problems with new solutions. That’s of course never the goal." Limits of LCAs Reusable systems like Loop open the door to a larger debate within the field of environmental accounting. In recent years, officials at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) have surveyed literature and pioneered studies assessing the sustainability of reusable systems in a range of contexts, from water bottles to beer kegs. "There’s no simple answer to the question of disposable versus reusable packaging," said Peter Canepa, an LCA practitioner at the DEQ, in an interview with Waste Dive. At the request of local brewers in Oregon, the DEQ performed an LCA to determine the impact of the industry’s traditional reusable stainless steel kegs when compared with the rise of new single-use plastic beer kegs. "Even with the washing and sterilization, all those steps were accounted for and reusable stainless steel kegs were more beneficial," said Canepa, referring to the LCA results. "But there started to be a point of inflection." Reuse made sense for breweries in Oregon who distribute their product locally, but numbers began to tilt in favor of disposable as distance was added to the supply chain. According to Canepa, breweries distributing East of the Mississippi found there were sufficient environmental implications, to the point that "making a new plastic keg, using it once, and disposing of it was actually less impactful." It is at this point that the LCA school of thought diverges from the one Loop more closely adheres to. Advocates of circular economy theory (like SPC’s Gendell) still promote the use of LCA as a tool, but put far more weight on systems being regenerative. The idea is that waste from one system forms a resource for another. "That can’t always be measured with any type of precision with a tool like LCA, which is an important, but imperfect science," Gendell explained. LCA, for example, does not yet have a way to quantify the effects of litter on marine or land environments, a category in which disposable materials score very poorly. Unpackaged’s Conway agrees that literature on reuse can often be difficult to decipher. "The thing that’s annoying is that it’s very hard to get independent environmental data … These industry-sponsored studies are not 100% reliable." She argues that just because reusable systems like Loop require more upfront resources than disposables shouldn’t be a reason to discount them, even if the LCA initially says otherwise. Especially in the beginning, it may be the case that they just require a bit of scale to make it worth it. "I don’t think that’s a bad system until they get to that point, I think they just have to be aware that it’s probably going to be inefficient to start off with," she said. The experiment continues Loop’s pilot model (the length of which is said to be undetermined) preserves extreme convenience, but that likely will not be way this service grows in the future. "What we’re doing now, to make it as convenient for consumers as possible, is really allowing them to order and return packaging at any time," explained Weir. "The purchasing of the products and the returning are truly two separate interactions." In an ideal world, pick-ups would coincide with drop-offs and vice-versa. And retailers, who have their own fleets of trucks, would leave warehouses full in the morning and come back full with returns (as opposed to returning empty, as they do now). In the future integrated version, consumers will purchase and return Loop products at retail locations directly. Confirmed partners include Walgreens and Kroger in the United States, Carrefour in France and Tesco in the U.K. The advantage to this model is that products would be sold in locations many shoppers already frequent, side-by-side with disposable counterparts of the same items. "That kind of brick-and-mortar shopping is going to open up additional avenues for the consumer," said Patrick Browne, director of sustainability at UPS, in an interview with Waste Dive. The company continues to work with Loop on the e-commerce model, but Browne said that retail deliveries would pose less of a logistical challenge. They take place in more dense settings, where drivers are delivering multiple packages per stop, making them more efficient. Whereas "in e-commerce, which is residential, typically your stops are a little bit farther in between houses." Loop’s decisions about reuse and disposal are not purely determined by environmental impact, sparking further complications. This comprises perhaps Loop's biggest challenge: balancing the complex, fragile world of environmental accounting with the extremely qualitative world of corporate branding, which has an altogether different set of values. For the companies Loop works with, packaging isn’t just about getting a product from here to there, or even strictly about safety. It’s also about maintaining brand uniformity and image. Disposable packaging, where each purchase yields a fresh container, does this quite well. Conversely, "packaging that is reusable will naturally scratch. It will naturally bend," said Weir, "There are very few ways around that. Especially when we’re looking at high, high numbers of reuse cycles." Loop’s challenge has been encouraging companies to reconsider their traditional stance on wear and tear, which is typically viewed as a performance failure. In the end, participating brands determine what is the standard for reuse, and where to draw the line between refilling and disposing. It is Loop’s job to adhere to that standard, meaning disposal may occur on the hundredth cycle, or the tenth. “The positive side is that I think these solutions are important to start to change the dialogue on end-of-life packaging and waste that’s become so normalized in American culture,” said MIT’s Bateman. "Even if the future of Loop looks very different from what it is now, the trials of today are essential to shifting the discourse on disposables." At the end of the day, Loop reveals an inconvenient truth about reusable systems: In the current market, it takes more work to make less waste. According to DEQ's Canepa, that extra work is necessary because, in a reusable world, more durable materials with a higher lifecycle impact raise the stakes. “This sounds really banal, but if the thing made to be reusable is not reused, or more specifically is not reused a specific number of times,” he explained, “then you actually may be doing worse [sic] for the environment.” Reusable programs thus require vigilant stewarding to ensure proper use, an inescapable part of Loop's grand experiment. "They can’t be left to operate to themselves,” emphasized Weir. “There needs to be certain rules, there need to be certain frameworks. Because one-to-one, a stainless steel container versus a paper pint, I mean, there’s no comparison.”

This year, Coca Cola unveiled a bottle made from 25% recycled plastic while PepsiCo announced it will be investing $25 million in recycling infrastructure. As mbg recently reported in our natural beauty trends forecast, Dove also switched to bottles made from 100% recycled plastic in 2019, and its parent brand, Unilever, announced that it will use half as much new plastic in its products by 2025. Meanwhile, Olay began testing refillable pods for its most popular moisturizer. For mindbodygreen's brand-new line of nr+ supplements—released as a limited-edition run last month, to be launched in broader distribution in January 2020—we've packaged the recyclable glass bottles in completely compostable trays, made from mushrooms. Public awareness and unrest about plastic pollution have been building for years (hello, straw bans), but it wasn't until 2019 that major corporations really started to do something about it.  

What's driving the shift away from plastic packaging?

A new service called Loop has helped kick-start the push away from plastic. Launched in May of this year in Paris and a handful of states across the northeastern U.S, the service allows people to shop for grocery, household, and personal care products from brands like Tide, Febreze, and Crest. The kicker? For a small markup, these goods are shipped out in durable, reusable packaging that can be sent back in to be reused and refilled. Loop is a direct rebuttal to the idea that recycling can save us from the waste crisis: "Recycling is like Tylenol: You take it when you have a headache, but there are better ways to never get the headache to begin with," Tom Szaky, the CEO of TerraCycle and Loop, told mbg last year. In the six months since launch, Loop has kicked off in another five states and plans to enter six new markets before early 2021: The U.K., Canada, Germany, Japan, Australia, and potentially the West Coast of the U.S. Loop is also onboarding about one new brand to their platform every business day. "There's been a lot of organic demand from consumers. We just hear nonstop from people that they're really excited about the service, and they want to see it available in their state," explains Heather Crawford, the VP of marketing and e-commerce at Loop. Upward of 85,000 people have signed on to the waitlist so far, and they're not the only ones who want to see the service take off: Crawford has seen that the massive names—the Unilevers and P&Gs of the world—are eager to get involved and rethink the delivery of their products to keep up with the times. When mbg heard Unilever's CEO Alan Jope speak at this year's Climate Week NYC, he confirmed that Unilever is working to make its business more environmentally responsible— a change that investors are insisting on more often. "I'm noticing our investors increasingly asking us to run our business for the long term. This idea that the Street is only interested in short-term performance, I don't accept," Jope said. "We're going to see capital inflows into responsible business and capital outflows out of polluting and carbon-dense industries. It's that simple." For another signal that the low-waste life is trending in the business realm, we can look to Williamsburg's Package Free Shop: Opened in 2017 by zero-waste poster child Lauren Singer, the shop sells health, beauty, and living essentials that are free of single-use plastic parts and packaging (think shampoo bars wrapped in paper and compostable vegetable brushes). The company's recent $4.5 million seed funding round proves that investors are confident that people beyond the trendy Brooklyn 'hood want to opt into its zero-waste ethos. "In the past year, more people than ever before have realized the impact that single-use plastic and waste has on the environment," Singer tells mbg. The recent funding will help the Package Free team work toward their mission to make zero-waste products hyper-accessible to the average Joe or Jane: "Our goal is to manufacture products that are both the most sustainable ones on the market and are as accessible and convenient as buying a Unilever or P&G product."

All signs point to more packaging innovation in 2020.

David Feber, a partner at McKinsey & Company who works primarily in the consumer packaged goods space, tells mbg, "Sustainability is combining with other powerful trends such as e-commerce and digitalization to drive major disruption in packaging over the next several years in the consumer products space." This year, a McKinsey report on Gen Z buying habits found that this "hypercognitive" generation, born between 1995 and 2010, will likely only push the needle toward more sustainable packaging solutions as they come of age. And sustainable packaging is just the start: A report by BBMG and GlobeScan predicts that in order to stay relevant with the next generation, companies will have to take more mission-driven action. "While Gen Z is ready to champion brands who show bravery on the issues that matter, they are also the first to call bullshit when they see it, especially when they see brands promoting their commitment to 'doing well by doing good' while staying silent about the negative impacts at the heart of the business practices that make their success possible," it reads.  

In 2020, Colgate-Palmolive will finally deliver a recyclable toothpaste container. After more than two decades of mounting concern around plastic waste and discussions about sustainable initiatives, the 213-year-old company announced it would release a fully recyclable tube under its Tom's of Main brand, with plans to convert all products to 100% recyclable packaging by 2025: “Building a future to smile about means finding new packaging solutions that are better for the planet, but until now there hasn’t been a way to make toothpaste tubes part of the recycling stream,” said Justin Skala, Chief Growth & Strategy Officer for Colgate-Palmolive, in a statement.   But is this move by Colgate too little, too late? By 2025, the focus of corporate sustainability will have shifted, evolving from the use of recyclable materials to creating circular business strategies.   While Colgate pottered with laboratory testing, the recycling market collapsed. The exchange rate between the U.S. and China made a lot of recycling unprofitable, leading a number of municipalities to stop their recycling collection altogether. With the collapse of the international market, cities like Philadelphia have had to turn to burning much of their recyclable waste.   Compounding this problem is the fact that the majority of recyclable plastics doesn’t get recycled anyway. Only 9% of plastic packaging in the U.S. is recycled, 12% is burned and the rest ends up in a landfill—or even the sea. And while Adidas creates sneakers out of Pacific Ocean plastic and Walmart’s Asda uses similar debris to pave a parking lot, these programs are just delaying the inevitable: society ultimately has to deal with that plastic when it turns up in the waste system again.   What use is a new tee made from a mix of upcycled cotton and recycled fishing nets anyway when the used product needs to be processed again? Maybe we need to stop differentiating ‘single-use' from ‘recyclable' and come to the conclusion that nearly all plastic is used once. If we can grasp this notion, then we might be able to judge how corporations offload the responsibility to efficiently recycle on our local governments, which could seem an unfair and undue burden on them and our taxes.   Some retailers are already taking matters into their own hands. “We’re working with our suppliers and packaging manufacturers, looking at alternatives to plastics,” says Karen Graley, packaging manager at U.K. grocer Waitrose,” while the CEO of REI co-op explains, “We are in the throes of an environmental crisis that threatens not only the next 81 years of REI, but the incredible outdoor places that we love.” His recent call-to-action letter reads, “Climate change is the greatest existential threat facing our co-op. I believe we do not have the luxury of calling climate change a political issue. This is a human issue. And we must act now.”   When our researchers at PSFK studied hundreds of new ideas and signals developing within the sustainability space, we identified several emerging short- and long-term trends. Over the next 12-24 months, the focus for corporate sustainability programs dealing with product waste is likely to be what is defined as the Circular Economy. Beyond that, we spotted trends around new ways to avoid waste and inefficiencies. In this article, we explore the former set of trends and share them in a framework to help you as a business executive or even a consumer to consider how to approach sustainability.   No doubt, you’ve already read stories and reports on the Circular Economy, a concept around a cycle where we keep resources in use for as long as possible, extract the maximum value from those resources while in use, then recover and regenerate those resources at the end of their lives. By conducting pattern recognition on the latest ideas developing within this space, we identified a number of key pillars: receive, recycle, repair, refill, rent and resell. As corporations look to evolve their sustainability efforts, these six themes will guide them in developing a more holistic strategy. First we define the pillars, then explore what they look like in practice.   1. Receiving Receiving involves retailers and brands facilitating the simple return of their products and packaging at the end of what their owner thinks is their useful life. Sometimes this collection happens in the store, but at other times this gathering of used product may be more proactive. These materials are used to make new products, passed to external facilities to recycle, or end up in a landfill—which is currently the most likely result.   2. Recycling Building off of the notion of receiving, recycling concerns the reuse of materials as new products that the retailer and brand can leverage as part of their commercial business. The passing on of consumed materials to an external recycling facility or partner is not a part of this strategy.   3. Repairing Repairing involves fixing or upcycling product so that it either has a longer life or can be sold as new. This pillar includes both the servicing of products owned by customers and the repair of previously owned items.   4. Reselling Reselling concerns the creation of marketplaces that allow retailers or consumers to sell previously owned products.   5. Refilling Refilling is a system of avoiding packaging by expecting consumers to replenish the core product with their own reusable vessel. This creates efficiencies in production (mainly, bulk orders) and improves the frequency of brand-consumer interaction.   6. Renting Renting is the short-term loan of products so that they can be reused by different consumers. The items are therefore more frequently employed and not left in storage, plus there is less demand for virgin product. Pillars defined, now let’s take a closer look at how this framework for sustainability can manifest in business:

Receiving

When it comes to the ways retailers and brands are facilitating the simple return of their products and packaging, there are several tactics. Sometimes stores choose simplicity and accept returns on premise. For example, U.K. grocer Sainsbury’s is planning to accept milk and glass soda bottles as part of a drive to halve the amount of plastic packaging it uses over the next six years. Department store John Lewis is also now taking back beauty packaging, which is traditionally hard to recycle. Levi Strauss has a take-back program that sells wares to a third-party who transforms old denim into insulation for community buildings.   But how effective is that drop box by the store door? It assumes consumers will remember to carry their products into a store—when on most trips, they still forget their reusable grocery bags. Some firms are therefore incentivizing the returns: Patagonia will accept any good-condition product that is not a “next-to-skin garment” and provide a gift card for up to $100. Similarly, Canadian outdoor clothing company Arc’teryx has a new program called Rock Solid Used Gear that incentivizes customers to bring their lightly used products back to the store in exchange for a gift card valued at 20% of the item’s original retail price. IKEA Canada also allows customers to “sell back” their gently used furniture to the store and receive store credit. Adidas has a new system in the U.K. called Infinite Play that lets consumers return any branded products purchased within the past five years in exchange for a gift card and loyalty points.       Meanwhile, some companies aren’t just waiting for the shoppers to turn up; they’re going out to get their used product: H&M ran a test earlier this year in New York where it offered Lyft rides to the store for shoppers planning to deliver used product and John Lewis is sending trucks out to collect larger items in the U.K. Vogue Business says that “at a time when brands are finding it increasingly expensive to attract and retain customers, take-back programs are a way to stand out.”

Recycling

Receiving product doesn’t necessarily imply the recycling and regeneration of materials into new products for the retailer and brand to use in commercial business. There are companies developing enterprise-level strategies when it comes to the pre-recycling stage: For instance, H&M picks up clothing and shoes in more than 60 countries and sells some of the materials back to the companies who made the original clothes. The actual reprocessing of the materials into new product is burdened with challenges, not the least of which is the presence of potentially harmful constituents: The fabric from a used pair of jeans could contain formaldehyde, carcinogenic dyes, toxic heavy metals and more, which poses problem for enterprises looking to avoid including an unknown assortment of nefarious chemicals in the next generation of product. One solution to this issue is implementing new recycling processes: a startup called Evrnu breaks down used fabric into constituent molecules, enabling the isolation of any unwanted materials as well as desired ones, like pure cellulose, for repurposing.

Repairing

While used items often get shredded and returned as raw ingredients for the product, some companies are fixing, or upcycling, product so that it either has a longer life or can be sold as new.   Luxury U.K. department store Harvey Nichols now has an after-care service called The Restory that offers not only to repair and restore premium items but even “reimagine” them.  After years of criticism, Apple is finally shipping official parts to repair shops that have had to use third-party materials in the past.   Atelier & Repairs is a boutique fashion label that specializes in the remaking of old and used products. Brands like Gap and Deckers have collaborated with them to explore the repair of old hoodies and jeans to create fresh fashion that’s not made of virgin stock. At the announcement of the Gap collaboration, the brand’s Head of Adult Design, John Caruso, told reporters that the partnership with Atelier & Repairs allowed the company to reinterpret and “reimagine their classic styles, lengthening the traditional product life cycle.” California-based b-corp Dhana takes this remake concept further by upcycling a customer’s memories into a new outdoor coat, including their concert tees, Comic-Con costumes and other memorabilia into the lining.   Patagonia seems to be one of the most progressive brands in the repair and remake space, reportedly fixing 100,000 items each year in 72 repair centers globally. Some of these items are now appearing on the site of its sub-brand WornWear, which has an online presence and recently opened its first store in Denver, Colorado. WornWear doesn’t just repair and resell items: the designers also reimagine them by mixing pieces from recycled products they have. Vogue Business reports that the new line doesn’t cannibalize existing sales, but “brings in customers who are, on average, ten years younger than the typical Patagonia shopper.”      

Reselling

As products get returned, repaired or remade, we’re witnessing the creation of marketplaces that allow retailers or consumers to sell previously owned products. German online fashion retailer Zalando has been testing a second-hand store concept for women's fashion items called Zircle. The store sells used fashion items that were purchased back from customers on their Zalando Wardrobe app. One objective of the test is to understand if the company can reach new customers.   Premium U.K. department store Selfridges has been working with third parties like Vestiaire and Depop to develop shop-in-shops that resell shoppers' apparel. The Vestiaire Collective space also comes with a resale point where customers can deposit items that subsequently appear on the brand’s app for sale.   Online retail platform Farfetch recently launched Second Life, a pilot initiative that allows consumers to resell the designer bags sitting in their wardrobe. “We're on a mission to become the global platform for good in luxury fashion—empowering everyone to think, act and choose positively,” reads their site. “Services like Farfetch Second Life help our customers extend the life of the clothes they buy.”   Meanwhile, with every new purchase, fashion brand Cuyana is including a shipping label that helps consumers send unwanted clothes to reseller thredUP, who will in turn send coupons for every successful resale. “Young shoppers like pre-owned goods for their lower prices and ability to express concern for causes like sustainability,” says fashion editor Lucy McGuire. Research commissioned by thredUP reports that the total secondhand apparel market will reach $51 billion in the next 5 years and will be larger than Fast Fashion in 10 Years.

Refilling

Retailers and service providers are also providing more ways to refill and restock certain products. U.K. grocer Waitrose has launched trials of its Unpacked system to gauge shoppers’ reactions to packaging-free food and drink options including the use of refills. They encourage shoppers to not only bring along reusable shopping bags but also their containers for filling up with the products during their Unpacked shop. The containers can be any material, size, shape or weight, but if shoppers don’t have anything to hand at home, they're welcome to buy bags/containers in store. Waitrose even encourages customers to bring their own coffee cup to enjoy a brew in the aisles.         In London, The Body Shop now offers a product refill station, while at Bleach London shoppers can buy glass bottles filled with their favorite shampoo and conditioner, then return for refills. To track the growing number of zero-waste/refill stores in the U.K. capital, an advertising agency created the Useless London online map.   On U.S. college campuses, rather than selling new bottles of water, The Coca-Cola Company has been trialling PureFill refill stations. In Sydney, the vegan online retailer Flora&Fauna has a new brick-and-mortar store that offers refills of zero-waste goods.   NYC's fast-casual chain Dig is testing a closed-loop dishware program where restaurant goers receive a reusable bowl and lid with the expectation that they return with it every time they visit the brand's Washington Square Park outpost.   Similar to a pattern observed with receiving, this refill service is not only taking place in the store, but also in the home. Terracycle has been a pioneer in the recycling movement: its Loop system delivers everything in a returnable container. Brands like P&G and retailers like Krueger have partnered with Loop, now letting shoppers enjoy an array of package-free products, including Crest oral rinse, Tide laundry detergent and even Haaen Dazs ice-cream. “The response has been overwhelmingly positive. It's phenomenal how many people have signed up for it,” said Loop co-founder Tom Skazy to PSFK. “Consumers understand that there's a garbage problem. While some prioritize the environmental aspect, others really like the design aspect, and some really like the convenience aspect. When you put all that together, it's a pretty big ecosystem of benefits.”

Renting

And finally, brands are also exploring the short-term loan of products so that they can be reused by different consumers. Some of this has been pioneered in the luxury fashion space for a few years now (think services like Rent the Runway), but there are signs of more mainstream options. H&M, for example, has launched its first clothing rental service at a newly refurbished store in Stockholm, following similar efforts by Banana Republic, Urban Outfitters and Ann Taylor Loft. Levi’s is exploring the space through a partnership with Rent The Runway. “For this crowd, consignment sites like thredUP and Poshmark, as well as the rental services, offer a lower-cost way to keep the ‘Gram fresh without hoarding clothes,” writes Ankita Rao in an article entitled ‘Clothes Are Canceled’ on Vice.com.   Rental goes well beyond apparel—IKEA is renting furniture, Lego has the service Netbricks for the rental of its little plastic building blocks—but fashion is where the groundswell is. According to research by GlobalData, the U.S. garment rental market was worth $1 billion in 2018, less than 1% of the total apparel market, but it also grew 24% in that year compared to 5% for the wider clothing market. Different ways to rent, like P2P platforms, are cropping up in the clothing rental space as well: Wardrobe is a just-launched sharing network operating out of local dry cleaners in Manhattan, letting members borrow high-end, designer and even vintage pieces from each other's closets and solving for the common issues around renting like convenience and value.       As retailers evolve beyond the classic Reduce, Reuse, Recycle mantra to embrace the six pillars described above, they ultimately are moving toward enabling closed-loop systems, embedding sustainability into their business model in a way that merges seamlessness and customer satisfaction with avoidance of waste creation in the first place and repurposing of original materials. This focus is not without good incentive: consumers are a driving factor in the push for true sustainability, wielding their spending power with retailers effecting the changes they want to see. Nielsen found that 81% of surveyed consumers think companies should support improving the environment (this sentiment was particularly strong among millennials and Gen Z), while 50% of CPG growth between 2013 and 2018 came from sustainability-marketed products.   Based on these signals, what could the future look like? A zero-waste restaurant in Brooklyn may give us a glimpse. Mettā re-opened earlier this fall in Fort Greene, partnering with regional farmers to secure ingredients from the source at their peak, concentrating on eco-friendly transportation and preservation methods, and curbing water waste wherever possible. Further, the business purchases electricity from 100% renewable sources, and offsets the 75% of its carbon footprint generated from food production by buying sequestration initiatives, which harness or avoid releasing an equivalent+ amount of carbon into the environment, according to the company's website.       While perhaps a more extreme example, Mettā's viability proves that businesses are taking the next generation of sustainability seriously, moving beyond the ineffectiveness of recycling into an era of inherent sustainability and investing in thoughtful strategies to enable consumption without destruction.   But why should businesses really bother about what a restauranteur is creating in Brooklyn or a grocery store is doing in London? Maybe because a massive population of young, militant people are emerging as potential consumers, who know things can be different and are determined to make them better. They have Greta Thunberg and now there are activists like Feroz Aziz. These passionate minds have better and faster communications tools than your social listening platform can offer and can amass faster than your staff can fire-drill. Moreover, there is infinitely more of them than there are of you, so businesses need to align to a new framework for sustainability and retool for a new set of practices.

From food manufacturers to e-commerce giants, the pressure is on to have at least some form of sustainable business practice as more consumers align with environmentally-friendly businesses. Loop is one way some larger brands are starting to dabble in becoming greener without resorting to completely uproot their existing supply chains. Created by recycling company TerraCycle, the online platform allows customers to shop from their favorite brands in a cleaner, more environment-friendly manner using reusable containers. After filling out your online shopping bag via the Loop online shopping platform, the products are stored in several sturdy, reusable containers before sending the bulk of them to you. Users simply just have to pay a small deposit for the durable, multi-use package designs—not unlike glass milk bottles from the days of milkmen. Rather than using discardable containers that usually end up in the trash, food items like your favorite Häagen-Dazs ice cream are stored in containers designed specifically for the product (in this case, the ice cream is stored in a stainless steel container). Not only is it greener, but the reusable container keeps the ice cream frozen for much longer—proving that functional upgrade considerations also went into the design of the new containers. Says the company: “Most products today are “linear” – thrown away after they’re used (typically once). This one-way model sends valuable resources to the trash. In a “circular” system, that line is bent into a circle that keeps resources in use and cycling through the system for as long as possible. The goal of the circular economy is to make those circles as tight as possible by reducing the number of steps (and the resulting energy, transportation and resources needed) to get our products from useless to useful again.” This call towards reusable packaging is inspiring brands to think about how they design their products. Toothpaste, for instance, doesn’t fit well in a reusable container; so Unilever has created several chewable toothpaste tablets which are stored in a tin (think of it as chewing gum which cleans your mouth). Participating Brands and Updated Package Design Details (via Packaging World):

• Pantene is introducing a unique bottle made with lightweight, durable aluminum for its shampoo and conditioner.
• Tide is participating in Loop with its Tide purclean plant-based laundry detergent in a new durable bottle made from stainless steel with a simple twist-cap and easy-pour spout.
• Cascade, continually looking for ways to make the dish cleaning experience better and environmentally friendly, has developed a new ultra-durable packaging for Cascade ActionPacs, which enable consumers to skip the prewash.
• Crest is introducing new Crest Platinum mouthwash, a unique formula that delivers fresh breath and stain prevention in a sustainable, refillable glass bottle.
• Ariel and Febreze are participating with durable, refillable packaging that is also available in stores, testing a new direct-to-consumer refill-and-reuse model.

Once you’re done with the containers, all you have to do is store the containers back in the provided tote bag (no cleaning needed) and call Loop to pick it up. You’ll get your deposit back and have free space to store new shopping items.

First announced in January, Loop recently went live. Loop is the brainchild of Tom Szaky, founder of Trenton, NJ-based recycling pioneer TerraCycle. The latter, which Szaky formed 15 years ago, works with consumer product companies, retailers and others to recycle all manner of stuff, from dirty diapers to cigarette butts. And it teams up with companies to integrate ocean plastic and other hard to recycle waste streams into their products and packaging. Loop—its parent company is TerraCycle—is different. It’s all about creating a circular system, in which containers and other receptacles are reused, rather than disposed of and then recycled. “Recycling is incredibly important,” says Szaky. “But it’s only a short-term solution. It doesn’t solve the root cause.” With that in mind, Loop partners  with retailers, as well as manufacturers, which create new packaging for products—orange juice, laundry detergent, you name it—in durable, reusable metal or glass packaging. Consumers return the containers to a store or arrange for them to be picked up at home after a certain number of uses, depending on the product. (Brands can’t participate unless their packaging can be reused at least 10 times). The 41 brands listed on the Loop web site include everything from Tropicana and Tide to Colgate, Crest and Clorox. Szaky came up with the idea in 2017 and announced the company at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. It went live in May. Such stores as Kroger and Walgreens on the East Coast and Carrefour in Paris are stocking their shelves with Loop items. Brands create the packaging and, according to Szaky, it takes about a year for them to go from design to manufacturing. Still, according to Szaky, it’s a project brands are perfectly suited to take on. “They’re set up to do this kind of thing,” he says. “When they launch new products, they go through a similar process.” Consumers, who put down a small fully refundable deposit on each purchase, return the items in a special Loop bag when it’s time. (Prices are comparable to non-Loop versions). Loop then sorts and cleans them and returns them to the right brands to refill and start the process again. Szaky says the company is now shipping “under 100 products”, but expects that number to be 300-400 by the end of the year. He’s adding four to five products a week. For now, he expects that stores will mostly approach Loop products as they might organic produce, positioning products in separate sections on shelves. More Loop programs are planned for stores in the UK, Toronto, Tokyo and California.