Reusable packaging __ from stainless steel ice cream containers to glass jars of soap __ is about to become more common at groceries and restaurants worldwide.   Loop, a two-year-old company that collects and sanitizes reusable containers, said Wednesday it’s expanding after successful trials at groceries in France and Japan. Kroger and Walgreens in the U.S., Tesco in the United Kingdom and Woolworths in Australia are among the chains partnering with Loop to sell household staples in reusable packages. McDonald’s, Burger King and Tim Hortons have also signed on.   In all, Loop says, 191 stores and restaurants worldwide will be selling products in reusable packages by the first quarter of 2022, up from just a dozen stores in Paris at the end of 2020.   Grocery stores will have a special Loop area, where manufacturers __ from independent brands to big players like Nestle __ have packaged pantry items, household cleaners and other products in reusable containers. More than 150 manufacturers will be participating worldwide by early next year, selling 375 products.   Customers pay a deposit __ ranging from 15 cents for a bottle of Coca-Cola to $10 for a stainless steel container of Clorox wipes __in addition to the price of their item. When customers are finished with the container, they can return it to the store and get their deposit refunded through Loop’s app. Loop collects the containers, cleans them and returns them to manufacturers to be refilled.   Fast food outlets __ including a handful of Burger Kings in New York, Tim Hortons in Toronto and McDonald’s in the U.K. __ will also distribute and collect reusable coffee cups and sandwich holders made from sturdy plastic.   Reusable packaging is well-developed in other industries, like automotive, said Cimberly Weir, an outreach coordinator and instructor at Michigan State University’s School of Packaging. But to her knowledge, Loop is the first to try this with consumer products.   “We are the ones who are responsible for actually getting that product returned,” she said. “So it’s putting a lot more pressure on everyday citizens to do their part.”   While Loop’s approach is unique, it’s one of many ongoing efforts to eliminate packaging waste. Lego said last year it would remove plastic packaging from its play sets. Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Keurig Dr Pepper have invested millions to improve the recycling and processing of their plastic bottles. Amazon encourages customers to get their items shipped in fewer boxes; the company says it has eliminated 1 million tons of packaging since 2015.   Loop __ a division of New Jersey-based recycling company TerraCycle __ is actually an old idea, says TerraCycle Founder and CEO Tom Szaky. Before the 1950s, products were made to last, but they’ve gotten thinner and cheaper in the decades since, he said.   “We’re hitting the apex of that now, and people are fed up with that trend,” Szaky said. “There’s a huge attraction to the idea of higher quality and materials.”   That’s true for Chris Critchett, 66, who was browsing the Loop aisle in a Tesco store in Milton Keynes, England, earlier this week.   “I think lemonade bottles used to be like that when I was younger, so I think it’s quite a good idea,” Critchett said. “It’s just trying to get people to actually do it, so they work it into their shopping system.”   Szaky said the company sees around 80% of the packaging returned within 60 days of purchase. In some cases, he said, consumers may just be keeping the packaging and reusing it themselves.   Szaky said every country in which Loop operates has a dedicated cleaning facility as well as smaller facilities where packaging can be stored before cleaning. He recognizes that transporting all that material has an environmental impact, but he says reusing a container dozens of times is still less harmful than repeatedly extracting material from the earth to make new packaging.   Loop gets its funding from the fees it charges to its corporate partners. It’s not yet making a profit, Szaky said, but expects to within two years.   Keith Daley, chief impact officer at Kroger, the largest U.S. grocer, said his company signed on with Loop to help meet a multi-year commitment to reduce waste. In October, Kroger will launch a six-month Loop pilot at 25 Fred Meyer stores in the Portland, Oregon, area. Dedicated Loop aisles will display 20 separate items, including some of Kroger’s own products. Loop ambassadors will explain the program to customers.   “We fundamentally believe that this is one of those potentially game-changing ideas,” Daley said.   Loop had hoped to be in 1,000 stores and restaurants by this time, but the pandemic slowed its progress. Still, Szaky said demand for Loop remained even as stores shut down other waste-saving measures like communal bins for pantry staples.   Weir said a major turning point for the packaging industry came in 2006, when Walmart announced it would start grading suppliers on the sustainability of their packaging.   Interest in sustainability has only grown since then, Weir said. She sees it at Michigan State’s packaging school __ the nation’s largest __ where nearly all of the 600 students cite the environment as a reason they’re in the program.   Matt Casale, the environment campaign director of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, agrees that bringing reusable packaging into the mainstream is important. But he also wishes society would think more deeply about all the stuff that is made, packaged and shipped.   PIRG backs laws like one that recently passed in Maine, which charges manufacturers who create packaging a fee that is used to boost recycling. It also supports state bans on single-use plastic bags and polystyrene food containers, which have passed in Colorado and several other states.   “That’s going to be our 21st century challenge __ rethinking the way we do everything, to make it make sense on a very small planet with a lot of people living on it,” Casale said.

Loop, the global reuse platform, is moving in-store for the first time with the world's largest retailers, including Carrefour (France), Tesco (UK), AEON (Japan), Kroger (U.S.), and Woolworths (Australia). This transition marks the conclusion of Loop's pilot and the beginning of the reuse platform's next phase of growth. At the completion of this transition, the reuse platform will be in-store across five countries and on four continents. "Loop's goal has always been to grow, scale and be accessible to consumers around the world," says Tom Szaky, founder and CEO of TerraCycle and Loop. "With the world's largest retailers bringing Loop to physical brick and mortar locations, we are giving consumers what they've been asking for since Loop was introduced in 2019 – the ability to purchase the products they use every day in durable, reusable containers, with the convenience of shopping at their local market."

New Practitioners Guides

Separately, to continue scaling the reuse economy, TerraCycle and Loop collaborated with a multi-stakeholder consortium of leading consumer product companies, cities, and civil society organizations under the leadership of the World Economic Forum's Consumers Beyond Waste initiative, to develop three practitioners guides which are being launched. The City Playbook, Design Guidelines and Safety Guidelines for Reuse contain expert guidance and practical tools to help accelerate the adoption of reusable products and systems towards scaling innovative business models, such as Loop. The three papers will be available for download on the World Economic Forum website. "We are proud to release these three landmark community papers which we hope will offer valuable guidance to practitioners and stakeholders seeking to advance reuse solutions worldwide. It has been inspiring to see the development of these works thanks to the tremendous effort and cooperation among Forum's Consumers Beyond Waste vibrant multistakeholder community of leading consumer companies, policy makers and NGOs," added Zara Ingilizian, head of Shaping the Future of Consumption Platform, World Economic Forum.

Expansion Around the World

Loop's movement to an in-store retail model began in Paris, France with Carrefour in December 2020. In May 2021, Loop launched in-store at AEON in Japan and in-store at Tesco in September 2021. The global reuse platform will also expand into Kroger stores in the United States before the end of 2021. In 2022 the platform will be in-store at Woolworths in Australia. Additionally, Loop recently launched a reusable packaging partnership with McDonald's in the United Kingdom and is slated to launch with Burger King and Tim Hortons in select restaurants in the U.S. and Canada, respectively. With Loop's in-store shopping, customers will purchase their products in refillable, reusable containers found in Loop-specific aisles at retail partner locations. After they consume the products, they will drop off the empty packaging back at the store. Loop will then pick up the empty containers from the store to be cleaned, refilled, and made available for purchase by a new shopper.

Loop CEO and US retail partner Kroger share breaking news about the program’s global expansion into physical stores and how convenient it will still be for consumers. Lisa McTigue Pierce | Sep 22, 2021 https://youtu.be/PrXesMa0njA Loop — the global ecommerce platform that launched in early 2019 and is centered around branded products in reusable packaging — has just expanded from ecommerce-only to ecommerce plus in-store. Nine retail partners across the world will now sell Loop products in their stores and manage the returns of the reusable packages. Retail partners in the US are Burger King, Walgreens, and Kroger.   Packaging Digest brings you the inside story of this development. In this 30-minute video interview, we talk with Tom Szaky, Founder & CEO, of TerraCycle, the parent company of Loop; and Denise Osterhues, Kroger’s Senior Director of Sustainability and Social Impact.   Loop — the global ecommerce platform that launched in early 2019 and is centered around branded products in reusable packaging — has just expanded from ecommerce-only to ecommerce plus in-store. Nine retail partners across the world will now sell Loop products in their stores and manage the returns of the reusable packages. Retail partners in the US are Burger King, Walgreens, and Kroger.   Packaging Digest brings you the inside story of this development. In this 30-minute video interview, we talk with Tom Szaky, Founder & CEO, of TerraCycle, the parent company of Loop; and Denise Osterhues, Kroger’s Senior Director of Sustainability and Social Impact.   Among the questions they answer are:   • Since its launch in 2019, Loop has seen extremely rapid growth as a result of massive consumer demand. What is driving this consumer demand? And what does “massive” mean? • Also, since its 2019 launch, Loop has been able to scale up incredibly quickly, even during a pandemic. How? • How do you think this in-store expansion will impact Loop’s ecommerce sales? • What is the level of participation from Kroger? Will Loop products be in all your stores in the US? • Why did Kroger decide to do this? • How will Kroger handle the returns of empty packages? • Why have a special section in stores for Loop products? Why not just have the packages side-by-side with other products in their categories? • What’s the next step for Loop?

When TerraCycle launched Loop — its e-commerce service featuring goods packaged in reusable containers — two years ago during the World Economic Forum in Davos, the plan was always to eventually include physical retail locations in the mix.   "Our goal is [to] make reuse as big as possible," said Tom Szaky, CEO of TerraCycle, during a conversation ahead of the announcement.   Today, Loop announced a global expansion of its service — often likened to home milk delivery programs — as it moves from strictly e-commerce to a hybrid model that includes in-store with retail and fast food partners. In North America, its partners are Kroger, Walgreens, Burger King and Tim Hortons, a Toronto-based company owned by Restaurant Brands International (also Burger King’s parent company).   In other parts of the world, Loop has partnered with Carrefour (France), Aeon (Japan), Tesco and McDonald’s (United Kingdom) and Woolworths (Australia).   For context, when the service started with reusables sent to customers’ homes via UPS, it was in two markets: Ile-de-France, a part of the country that surrounds Paris, and the New York region, which included parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The expansion allows users to purchase products in reusable containers at physical retail locations — and return the packaging in person once it’s empty. (Items purchased online cannot be returned in person.)   The expansion has already started for some of its partners. On Sept. 13, Tesco launched its in-store Loop service in 10 of its more than 3,000 stores, after a yearlong pilot that launched in July 2020. By the first quarter of 2022, there will be in-store services in about 200 locations across Loop’s partner companies.         "With 88 everyday products available, we’re giving customers a wide range of options, and we’ll learn as much as we can from this to inform our future packaging plans," said Tesco Group CEO Ken Murphy in a press release about the launch.   Szaky said that other in-store rollouts will happen over the next month.   How it works   During our recent conversation, Szaky picked up a reusable McDonald’s coffee cup sitting on his desk. He noted that a customer could buy that cup at McDonald's and then drop it off at Tesco. Alternatively, someone could go to Tesco and buy laundry detergent or tomato ketchup and then drop the empty container off at McDonald's.   "As more retailers come up, that really strengthens to create that network where you can effectively have a disposable experience but act reusable," he said.   Partner stores and restaurants have bins for container drop off. As Loop has grown, Szaky said it has been building infrastructure to support the logistics of collecting, cleaning and sorting its reusable containers.   Szaky described its infrastructure as sets of major nodes and micro nodes. A minor node is where all the used containers are checked in and sorted. And he said that every participating city gets a minor node. Those all feed into the major node, where the cleaning gets done.   Loop plans to continue adding to this network of nodes. It thinks that in the U.S., it will need a total of five major nodes and 100 to 200 minor nodes. Szaky said that right now the company has one major node in the U.S., as it does in every other country where it has a partnership.   As partners expand the locations in which they offer Loop services in new cities, the company will add minor nodes there.         For the customer side of the equation, Loop has historically worked with a deposit system, where consumers pay a fee for the reusable packaging. When a container is empty and they return it, customers can choose whether they want that product replenished; if not, their deposit is credited to their account and returned, upon request. A similar system is in place with the in-person expansion via a mobile app, and each retailer or restaurant charges a different deposit for the packaging. The deposit for the McDonald’s coffee cup, for example, is $1. At McDonald’s, a regular cup of coffee costs about $1 on its own. Deposits on other items in the Loop ecosystem range from 15 cents for a Coca-Cola bottle to $10 for a Clorox wipes package.   Some retailers are also offering reusable tote bags — also available with a deposit — for customers to use for returning packaging to the store.

Why retail?

  In the years since the launch, Loop has continued to be reminded that consumers want convenience. With that in mind, as a 2020 GreenBiz headline noted, "Stores are essential for the Loop reusable packaging program."   To achieve its goal of making reuse as big as possible, the service has to be available to — and appeal to — more individuals than the Loop customer of February 2020, who skewed high-end or eco-conscious. Szaky said that in the years of analyzing the reuse movement, Loop decided it wanted to go the way of "prefill," where customers can return an empty reusable package and purchase another package that is filled with the product, because it believed this was the most stable opportunity for reuse.         For Loop, having a network of retailers that can take back reusable containers regardless of the origin and that can also offer new goods is also important. Szaky pointed to the example of having to take back a propane tank to a propane store and not being able to return it elsewhere. That model is limiting.   "We needed a platform that solves, that effectively creates an ecosystem of ‘buy anywhere, return anywhere’ and that at any brand can then play on top of the ecosystem. And any retailer can also do the same," Szaky said.   "That is the recipe for scaling this thing."   In the long term, the company plans to close the consumer pilot e-commerce sites as it scales up the in-store version of its service.   In addition to managing its Loop platform, TerraCycle partners with companies in another way: recycling packaging that cannot be put into curbside bins, instead collecting it through store drop off and mail-in initiatives. It handles a plethora of items — such as the plastic pouches used for Arm & Hammer and OxiClean detergent pods, thin plastic bags that enclose Bimbo Bakeries USA bread and bakery goods, and items from numerous beauty brands that offer goods in various types of packaging, including aerosol cans, shampoo bottles and mascara tubes. The company recently faced scrutiny for this work. In March 2020, Last Beach Clean Up filed a lawsuit against TerraCycle that alleges that it — along with its biggest corporate partners — was greenwashing and not telling the full truth about the recyclability of its packaging.   TerraCycle reached out to GreenBiz after publication and noted that it stands by its recycling promise and believes the claims in the suit are false and grossly exaggerated. "TerraCycle has been working in good faith with the party who brought the lawsuit as their end goals are the same as ours: to address the world's current waste crisis," it wrote by email.   On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Maxine Chesney dismissed a similar lawsuit that Greenpeace filed against Walmart.

If you walk into a Fred Meyer supermarket in Portland, Oregon, in late October, you might notice something new: In some of the chain’s stores, a new section will sell common products, like hand soap, in reusable packaging that customers can later bring back to the store.   Kroger, which owns the chain and plans to roll out the new reusable section in 25 Fred Meyer stores in Portland before potentially expanding to other cities, is one of several retailers to begin using Loop, a platform for reusable packaging that started with online orders. “It’s really aligned with our vision of a world with zero waste,” says Denise Osterhues, senior director of sustainability and social impact at Kroger. “It’s innovative, and it’s a platform that could ultimately help end single-use packaging and disposability that we’ve all become so accustomed to.”   Customers pay a deposit on the package, which they get back when they return it to a drop-off bin in the store. Then Loop sorts the packaging at a “micro node” nearby, and sends it to a larger facility for cleaning and sanitizing, before ultimately returning it to a manufacturing facility to be refilled and reused. Some of the brands in the platform use standard packaging that just hasn’t been reused in the past, like Gerber baby food in glass containers.   The same platform launched in Tesco, the U.K. supermarket chain, in ten stores earlier this month. Tesco, which is offering 88 different items in reusable packaging, calculated that if customers in those 10 stores switch to the reusable version of three products—Coca-Cola, Heinz Tomato Ketchup, and Ecover cleaning products—the packages would be reused more than 2.5 million times a year. While the new store display has signs explaining how the system works, Tesco is also using Loop “ambassadors” at the launch to help customers understand what to do. “It’s effectively exactly like how organic came to life in stores, when you would walk into a store and see an organic section and then shop that section if you care about organic products,” says Tom Szaky, CEO and founder of Terracycle, the recycling company that created the Loop platform.       The system launched in late 2020 in Carrefour, a large retailer in France, and in Aeon stores in Japan in May 2021. Walgreens plans to begin using the in-store system in early 2022, and Ulta Beauty will follow sometime next year, along with Woolworth’s in Australia. Some restaurant chains are also beginning to use the system, including McDonald’s, Burger King, and Tim Horton’s.   Kroger chose to launch first in Fred Meyer stores in Portland, Osterhues says, because the company knew that customers in the area were particularly interested in sustainability (the stores also have a larger physical footprint than some of the company’s other supermarkets, so there was more space available for the new display). It hopes to expand. “Our hope would be to scale it, because that’s when it becomes truly financially beneficial, as well as better impact for our planet,” she says.   “The critical piece here is scale,” says Szaky. “It’s more brands and retailers really taking this seriously by going in-store and then scaling their in-store presence. And that will then leave us where hopefully in a few years from now, you’ll be able to go anywhere, into your favorite retailer, and see a Loop section with whatever your favorite brands are.”   New legislation could also help push it forward, he says. In France, for example, a new anti-waste law includes a ban that will begin next year on disposable tableware in restaurants, including fast food chains. “That’s actually a pretty big deal for something like a McDonald’s,” he says.