When buying food and beverage items, consumers are looking for delicious treats and drinks, but younger consumers are also looking to enjoy products that can help the environment. The average consumer is more aware that single-use containers, often made of plastic, are negatively affecting the environment. A Consumer Brands Association report found 86% of Americans believe we are experiencing a packaging and plastic waste crisis. What are producers doing to address this crisis? CPG brands create their own sustainability solutions Most legacy food and beverage companies have set sustainability goals for their organizations. Many of those goals include increased availability of products that come in sustainable packaging. Conagra, Nestle and Unilever all made recent pledges to increase sustainable materials in their packaging over the next five years. Conagra intends to make all of its plastic containers renewable, recyclable or compostable while Nestle and Unilever both signed the European Plastics Pact, which designates that participants are committed to boosting the recycled plastic content for single-use products and creating reusable packaging. In California, PepsiCo is testing a better substitute for plastic rings on beverage six-packs: molded pulp and paperboard packaging. This trial demonstrates how CPG producers are working to address customer desires for sustainable packaging that still fills the durability needs of companies. “[W]e’ve worked collaboratively with our suppliers to ensure the two solutions that we’re testing meet the needs of our consumers and customers while also addressing our functionality and sustainability requirements,” Emily Silver, PepsiCo Beverages North America’s vice president of innovation and marketing capabilities, said to BeverageDaily. While many brands are creating their own packaging solutions or reducing their virgin plastic use, several are also investing in a broader eco-friendly packaging infrastructure. Nestle is planning to purchase roughly $1.6 billion worth of recycled plastic over the next five years, and Perrier has launched an investment program for startups that are developing packaging options that have a “positive environmental and social impact.” Loop takes reusing to the masses Rather than simply reducing or recycling virgin plastic, some companies are addressing waste by offering accessible, reusable packaging. Recycling business TerraCycle debuted its circular delivery service Loop to consumers in 2019, and it is currently available in Paris, France, and the northeast region of the US. Loop’s online platform allows users to shop for consumer packaged goods products in reusable packaging from a variety of brands, which are shipped in a reusable container -- the Loop Tote -- that rids the need for single-use shipping materials. “While disposable design focuses on making our packaging as cheap as possible, durable design focuses on making containers as long lasting as possible, allowing us to access unparalleled materials, design, and function,” the Loop site states. After using up the products, Loop customers return the empty packaging via free UPS pickup where it is returned to Loop to be cleaned and disinfected in preparation for reuse. “Customers are demanding that brands step up and provide solutions that produce less waste,” said Loop Publicist Eric Rosen. “Brands are responding to this push by investing in sustainable packaging solutions such as Loop’s reuse model.” The service is currently available online, but Loop products will be available in Walgreens and Kroger retail locations in the US later in 2020. Once Loop products arrive at retail, customers will also be able to make in-store returns of reusable containers instead of shipping them. Loop’s brand partners include food brands such as Haagen Dazs, Hidden Valley, Tropicana and Chameleon Cold Brew. The service also offers personal care and cleaning products from brands such as Gillette, Dove, Tide and Clorox. Rosen said that Loop welcomes participation from any type or size of CPG brand as long as they are committed to transforming their packaging from single-use to multi-use. “One challenge is redesigning packaging that lasts many reuse cycles,” Rosen said. “Brands must find the right material and design to suit their product. TerraCycle acts as a consultant for the packaging development process and tests all packaging for cleanability and durability prior to approval in the platform.” Rosen also revealed that Loop will be expanding internationally in 2020. Loop will partner with Tesco in the UK, Loblaws in Canada and Aeon in Japan. The platform also plans to be available in Germany and Australia in 2021. “Consumers can support brands that are taking the next step from recyclable packaging to reusable packaging,” said Rosen. “[R]ecycling is never going to be enough to solve waste at the root cause.”  

Companies like Coca-Cola used to collect 98 percent of their bottles, and new entrepreneurs are learning from their tactics. TRENTON, NEW JERSEYIn the flood of innovative solutions that have emerged in the last several years to save the world from plastic pollution, Tom Szaky’s fix may be one of the most audacious. Don’t misunderstand. He has not tried to come up with yet another formula to make plastic magically biodegrade like leaves on the ground, a goal of many entrepreneurs that remains elusive. Nor has he devised new ways to remake disposable plastic packaging into new plastic packaging. Instead, Szaky has gone old school with a concept that dates to the turn of the last century—returnable, refillable containers. The idea was introduced to the world by Coca-Cola in the early 1920s, when Coke was sold in expensive glass bottles that the company’s bottlers needed back. They charged a two-cent deposit, roughly 40 percent of the full cost of the soft drink, and got about 98 percent of their bottles back, to be reused 40 or 50 times. Bottle deposit programs remain one of the most effective methods ever invented for recovering packaging. Ten months ago, Szaky launched Loop, an online delivery service that uses sturdy, reusable containers. The bold part of his venture—or risk, if you are one of his financial backers—is that Loop pushes far beyond the uniformity of returnable beverage bottles and sells more than 300 items, from food to laundry detergent, in containers of various sizes and made from various materials. His signature product is Haagen-Dazs ice cream that comes packed inside a sleek, insulated stainless steel tub guaranteed to prevent its contents from melting. Slightly disheveled in jeans and a hoodie, Szaky looks every bit the millennial entrepreneur. Now 38, he dropped out of Princeton 17 years ago to become an innovator in the garbage business. He founded TerraCycle, a small waste management company, 10 miles from the Princeton campus. He figured out a way to recycle diapers, cigarette butts, and a long list of other non-recyclables. In time, he became more interested in restoring the circularity of that earlier era and eliminating the disposability from packaging altogether. “Loop’s theory is let’s learn from the past and go back to a model where when you buy your deodorant, you’re borrowing the package and just paying for the content,” he says.   This refillable steel Häagen-Dazs ice cream container is from Loop, a company that packages everyday items into reusable containers. Loop is part of the resurgence of refillables as a serious option to plastic waste. The beverage industry is expanding its use of returnable bottles; an Oregon brewery claims to have started the United States’ first state-wide refillable beer system. More significantly, efforts like Loop’s to reinvent packaging for products that don’t fit easily into the refillable category have attracted startups and some of the world’s largest corporate players. Starbucks and McDonalds are partnering in a pilot program in California known as the NextGen Cup Challenge to sell coffee in reusable cups. If it works, the companies could spare the world the remains of billions of paper cups lined with a thin film of plastic that prevents leakage. And in Chile, a small startup called Algramo is working to replace single-serving packets known as sachets that are sold by the billions in Africa and Asia. The concept was to make coffee, toothpaste and other products affordable to impoverished people who couldn’t afford to buy in larger amounts. Sachets are mostly not recyclable and have made the glut of plastic litter in those nations worse. Algramo, whose name means “by the gram” in Spanish, is creating a vending machine system to dispense food and cleaning products into reusable containers. Last December, it won the National Geographic and Sky Ventures Ocean Plastic Innovation Challenge’s prize for using circular economy principles and a $100,000 purse. As Szaky tours Loop’s warehouse, where newly filled containers are shipped out and returned empties taken in, he notes the irony that this age-old method has only flowered again because waste has become a global crisis. “Five years ago, we couldn’t have done this,” he says. No one would have signed on. Not consumers, who pay a healthy, refundable deposit. And not the companies he’s convinced to join his experiment. Consumers and product retailers might have laughed at the idea as too unrealistic and inconvenient, neither being the ingredients for success.The shipping expenses alone, which involve up to six transfers, would have given investors pause. Then, almost overnight, the game changed. Szaky pitched his idea to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and convinced Nestle, Unilever, Proctor & Gamble, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, among others, to sign on.

A spotlight on plastic waste grows

It’s easy to lose sight of how quickly the landscape of plastics has shifted. Only a decade ago scientists and plastic manufacturers and retailers were still arguing about whether disposable plastic was even a serious issue. In 2011, when Ocean Conservancy met with scientists, activists, and plastics industry executives in an effort to set up what eventually became, in 2012, the Trash Free Alliance so all parties could work together, no consensus on the issue existed. “There was the question, is this just unsightly or a real problem?” recalls George Leonard, the conservancy’s chief scientist. “People retracted back into their corners. The NGOs said, ‘The world is coming to an end,’ and the industry sector said, ‘We don’t think it’s a problem.’” The debate effectively ended with publication in 2015 of the first solid numbers showing plastic waste washing into the ocean at an average rate of 8.5 million tons a year. The years that followed produced a glut of anti-plastic campaigns, bans of shopping bags and other products, pledges by retailers to use more recycled plastic in new packaging, industry investment in recycling facilities, and cleanups of existing waste. A count of scientific studies assembled by Richard Thompson, the British marine scientist who coined the term microplastics, reveals how rapidly plastic came to be considered an environmental crisis. In 2011, the year of Leonard’s meeting, 103 scientific studies containing the words “plastic” and “pollution” were published. The count in 2019, using the same code words, was 879 studies. “Thank goodness we’re over the hump,” says Chelsea Rochman, a marine scientist at the University of Toronto who is leading a working group of scientists trying to sort out which of the various solutions are most effective. The consulting firm Systemiq, with offices in London, Munich, and Indonesia, is also making a similar assessment. The results of both projects may further shape the debate on how to proceed. In the meantime, it helps to consider where things stand today: Of the 9.2 billion tons of plastic ever manufactured, 6.9 billion tons have become waste. Most of that—6.3 billion tons, or to put it another way, a whopping 91 percent—has never been recycled. The number seemed so shocking that the UK’s Royal Statistical Society named it the international statistic of the year in 2018. That’s the same year that China stopped buying the world’s waste, and recycling has only become more troubled since. Beyond recycling, 12 percent of plastic waste is incinerated, mostly in Europe and Asia. About 79 percent goes to a landfill or leaks into the natural environment. As a measure of how quickly plastic production accelerated in recent decades, half of all plastics ever made has been produced since 2013. Production is projected to double in the next 20 years, according to a 2016 report by the World Economic Forum. Finally, plastic is exceedingly cheap to make. And its low cost is one of the main impediments to developing an economically viable, global system for recycling or otherwise disposing of plastic waste. “Recycled and reclaimed plastic has little value. Virgin plastic is cheaper to make,” Leonard says. “Why would you do anything else other than make more new plastic? It’s not a good business decision to do anything else.”

Back to the future

Aside from the economics, most of the solutions that might reduce plastic waste are hobbled by a passel of problems: still-to-be-solved technical challenges, misinformation, a lack of uniform standards that leaves consumers confused. Biodegradables often don’t actually biodegrade, especially in the oceans, where they’re much more likely to fracture into microplastics. Most compostables need very high heat to break down, requiring processing in special, industrial composters. Compostable material will not biodegrade, for example, in landfill. The two terms are often used interchangeably by consumers, but are not the same. Material labeled biodegradable can contaminate compostable material if added to the mix. Mechanical recycling, which involves grinding plastic waste into small bits that are melted and remade into new plastics, is also easily contaminated by incompatible types of plastic, dirt, and food residue. Plastics reprocessed by this method can only be remade so many times before losing strength and other characteristics. Chemical recycling, which returns plastics to their requisite molecules, alleviates much of both problems. Industry analysts regard it as the option showing the most promise, and the numbers of companies involved in developing chemical recycling is growing. But it’s still a big bet. It’s expensive and questions remain as to whether it can be scaled up enough to make a difference. In any event, both forms of recycling, as well as composting, are dependent on what remains the most dysfunctional component of dealing with plastic waste: Someone has to collect it all and sort it. Loop first launched last May in and around New York and Paris. It plans to expand to the UK, Toronto, and Tokyo later this year, and to Germany and Australia in 2021. The product line, Szaky says, grows by one or two a week and a new retailer joins, on average, once a month. Because consumer behavior is very hard to change, Szaky thinks the refillables business must come as close as it can to mimicking the ordinary shopping experience. He has partnered with Walgreens and Kroeger to set up aisles of refillables, similar to bulk food aisles, making refillables even more convenient to use. As technicalities of handling plastic waste are eventually resolved, it is the consumers who may become the toughest challenge of all. Plastic as a material is not the villain, but the way it’s used, he says, and the idea of single-use plastic is a concept that is now 70 years old. He poses a rhetorical question: “What do we as shoppers care about? Convenience, affordability, and performance. Not one of those three things has anything to do with sustainability.” He argues that consumers are the most important actors in sorting out the plastics mess, with the ability to effect corporate change with their wallets. “We vote blindly, day after day after day, with money, telling companies what we want, and we need to take that seriously,” he says. “We should buy less and make sure the things we buy are circular.”

Loop is now a reality in nine states in the northeastern United States, Washington, and plans to grow more in that country, Canada, Germany, United Kingdom and Japan. In less than a year of operation, Loop , a circular purchasing platform for consumer products designed not to generate packaging waste - developed by Tom Szaky and his team - has had an undeniable receptivity on the part of several brand-owned companies and retail chains around the world; and it is increasingly welcomed and used by final consumers, who see it as an efficient way to contribute to the mitigation of the environmental impact of waste. (More about Loop in this article from Mundo PMMI). From New York, Tom Szaky spoke with Mundo PMMI and explained the dimension that the platform has been charging. He also referred to the challenges and priorities that have been established for its consolidation and strengthening in different countries and regions of the world, and its future in other regions of the globe. PMMI World: Some define Loop as one of the most disruptive advances in Circular Economy and packaging to date. What is the balance after these eight months after its launch and has it been proven whether our society is ready for Loop? Tom Szaky: Loop is an engine for producers to create reusable versions of their products and for retail chains to integrate those offers, both physically, in stores, and in their online sales. There are many ways to assess the success of Loop and one of them is the number of people who are joining the initiative, that is, how large this ecosystem is becoming. And I must say that since we opened we are adding a brand every two business days; The number of new revenues is astronomical, it grows very quickly with some medium-sized brands and startups , but also with many large companies. The same goes for retail companies, we are receiving a retail firm every three weeks. In fact, in March of this year we will be going out with Tesco in the United Kingdom, with the Loblaws food and pharmacy chain in Canada in June, in Japan in November, and also in Germany. Australia is also on its way. Another way to measure the success of Loop is the availability to consumers. I am very pleased to say that this year, both in the United States and in France, you can see the products in the physical stores of retailers and they will be able to return the containers to the store, which is very important to be able to take the model to great scale. Additionally, retail chains such as Carrefour are inserting Loop products into their e-commerce pages, and the cost will be associated with shipping and collection. This brings great operational challenges and is the result of trials conducted during 2019. In general, what we have seen is that consumers are responding very well to the Loop model, and this is the reason we will continue to grow. In summary, today we have around 200 brands and we are adding a brand every two days, we also have about 50 retailers and we are adding one every three weeks. PMMI World: What is Loop's biggest challenge today?  Tom Szaky: Our biggest challenge and priority is to make Loop feel as “disposable” as possible, that is to say that the consumer lives the experience of feeling like on a platform exactly the same as what he experiences when he consumes a disposable product. One of the things that people have told us in the first presentations, and one of the main challenges, is that they would like to see more and more Loop products available in the market. In the beginning the products were only obtained online and the user bought them by this means; Now, through the retail chains, it is possible to find the products in the stores, which allows the buyer to acquire both the Loop products and the others that he usually buys. This is why it is important that the product feels disposable but works towards the consumer as reusable. This is what leads us to focus on the disposable experience, because that is what the user is looking for.   Loop is a circular buying platform for mass consumption products designed not to generate packaging waste, developed by Tom Szaky and his team.   PMMI World: The difference between the generation of millennials and the most senior generates an impact? Is it possible that it is easier to convince a millennial to buy through Loop than a Baby Boomer?   Tom Szaky: It's an interesting approach, but I don't share it. I think millennials join an initiative like Loop because they are tired of garbage; They have lived their entire lives using disposables and want to get out of that and do something different. But, in the case of a Baby Boomers or the parents of a millennial , the experience is very familiar, since that way the purchases worked before. Loop returns them to their childhood where there was no garbage, this is why an interest is generated for them, and for these reasons arouses emotion in both generations. PMMI World: What is Loop's biggest opportunity today? Tom Szaky: The main focus is to attract a large number of fast-moving consumer products and many retail chains that sell their products on the platform. Secondly, it is reaching fast food restaurants, and then there would be the clothing sector. PMMI World: How is Loop attracting fast food companies? Tom Szaky: We are now working with one of the largest fast food brands in the world, developing a type of reusable potato chip packaging, so that when ordering the customer can choose the reusable option and get an aesthetically pleasing packaging , beautiful, that works under the same method. PMMI World: What has been the main reason why TerraCycle has managed to convince big brands like Nestlé, Unilever, Pepsico, Danone - to name a few - to join and be part of Loop? Tom Szaky: I think that basically there have been two factors, which occurred simultaneously: the moment and the immense capacity that Loop offers to innovate and turn products into something exciting, with aesthetically beautiful packaging, that work. Those two factors together have been tremendously important for the development we are seeing today for Loop. PMMI World: What could you say about the innovations that Loop has encouraged in the design of reusable packaging?   Tom Szaky: I think consumers want to have the feeling and experience of disposable. The important thing about returning ownership of the container to the manufacturing company is that it becomes an asset, and being an asset manufacturers can make more significant investments in it. Loop gave brands and their designers the ability to achieve in the packaging aspects that they had always wanted to do and that the system had not allowed them basically due to cost factors. PMMI World: What is the power of the packaging reusability model? Tom Szaky: Reusability is an idea that everyone understands; Children today understand packaging more than its contents, they know that garbage is wrong and that recycling is fine, although they cannot explain anything about palm oil, or climate change. PMMI World: How was the task of convincing the consumer that reusability is possible? Tom Szaky: I think showing them that it works; Initially the consumer doubts, and once they see it in operation, everyone believes: none of this is new, this is how it was done around the 1930s. It is not impossible to sell this concept, it is simply to refresh an old idea. PMMI World: Could you mention any statistics that reflect the impact of the reusability model on packaging in terms of carbon footprint reduction? Tom Szaky: This depends on the packaging, of course. Statistically, around the first three years, the impact is equal to that of the disposable model. In the first use, the reuse is worse than in the case of the disposable; at all three uses it is the same; at five uses it is 15% better than waste; and in the tenth use it is 75% better. These are statistics of our allies and Loop, which we have also obtained through life cycle analysis, LCA. PMMI World: Infrastructure has been a very important challenge for you. Tom Szaky: Yes it has been a great challenge, but not the greatest. We are now present in France, in the United States, we are going to inaugurate Loop in the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan and Germany this year. We have very good infrastructure partners and with very good capital, so this has been a setback, but it is not an issue that cannot be overcome. PMMI World: What is the next step in the global expansion of Loop? Do you contemplate the possibility of being in Latin America soon? Tom Szaky: We are looking to enter Latin America, in Brazil we have been with TerraCycle for many years and we believe that by 2021 we will be there, with the Loop model. PMMI World: Having a reusable product means that it has an important value that exceeds the value of disposables, if the brands gave a value to the single-use container, do you think this would promote collection and recycling? Tom Szaky: Yes, definitely. The more value a single-use container is given, the greater its recyclability. PMMI World: TerraCycle has been recognized for recycling difficult materials. Do you think that migrating to reusability can affect recyclability? Tom Szaky: TerraCycle is growing very fast, we had an organic growth of 30% this year. The two initiatives are growing and have different roles; I believe that reusability has a projection towards the future and recyclability is more related to what we are doing in the present. The main focus on the production of disposable packaging is to make them as economical as possible, and when the packaging is cheaper the overall cost is reduced and it ends with a more complex packaging in terms of material, as in the case of multilayer. In my opinion that is the biggest problem, that the main objective of the brands, which is to reduce costs, goes in reverse of the recyclability of the packaging. PMMI World: How do you see the future? What is the greatest contribution that could be made to mitigate the impact of waste? Tom Szaky: For us it's about creating more reusable alternatives for the products and making them more available for more retailers to distribute. Our way of calculating success is by measuring how much users migrate from single-use containers to multi-use products and packages. That is our goal in general.

Old car seats. Cigarette butts. Used contact lenses. Most people think of this kind of detritus as future landfill, but Tom Szaky sees all this and more as recyclable. He’s the CEO and founder of TerraCycle and its newest initiative, Loop. Both are circular economy solutions that bridge the gaps between consumers, corporations, and waste. TerraCycle, founded in 2001, is a private recycling company that focuses on capturing and repurposing hard-to-recycle items by partnering with corporations and governments. Loop, launched publicly in mid-2019, takes on the problem of waste even more aggressively by working with brands to provide reusable packaging for common consumer products — think Tide laundry detergent or Häagen-Dazs ice cream. HBR asked Szaky, a global leader on reducing waste, about what he’s learned about how consumers, companies, and the government are — or aren’t — helping to reduce the massive amounts of waste humans create on a daily basis. In this edited interview, he also offers advice for business leaders who are interested in pursuing circular models. You’re sitting in a unique position between brands and consumers. What conversations are you having on each side? And which side is more resistant to the argument for sustainability? In the past two years I’ve seen a big shift in how consumers view waste. They’ve woken up to all the negatives of garbage and have started to see it as more of a crisis. That said, consumers are still voting with their dollar for things that benefit them personally, like convenience, performance, and overall price. They’re very vocal, but they’re not necessarily shifting their actual purchasing. Now, the vocal nature of the consumer alone does create a really exciting thing: Brands are waking up to this trend. Even more so, lawmakers are waking up and passing legislation that is affecting consumer product companies, like banning plastic bags and straws. In France in a few years, takeaway food packaging — plastic plates, cups, and utensils — will not be used if you eat in restaurants. These laws are then creating ripples across the consumer product retail industry. Is your feeling that governments are filling gaps that businesses have left? Or are they nudging consumers along, encouraging them to take the action they profess to support? It’s more complicated than that. Plastic straws weren’t seen as a problem up until maybe two years ago; then they became the icon of what’s wrong with plastic and disposability. After a huge public outcry, lawmakers started passing legislation banning the straw. Then companies proactively banned straws before even more legislation actually took hold. So a push from consumers led lawmakers to take action and then corporations jumped in. Now the plastic straw is effectively dying. But it took all three nudging each other. Tell me about the kinds of conversations you’re having with investors and other stakeholders as part of starting and leading two companies. What’s it like to be in the sustainability sphere, especially as a new startup? We started developing the concept for Loop just two years ago, which absolutely makes it a startup. TerraCycle is 16 years old and more of a growth company. So I have two different perspectives. TerraCycle has grown every year since the beginning, but in the past two years it has exploded. Corporations that wouldn’t have signed with us before are now signing on. And corporations that are signed on are going deeper. We grew our revenue 30% organically in 2019, compared to 2018, and expect the same in 2020. This is driven primarily by everything moving faster and companies wanting to go deeper versus big new surprises or new industries that have been asleep now waking up. In parallel, we also raised about $20 million for Loop Global and about $20 million for TerraCycle US. The key change there is that investors are looking much more for authentic impact investments. This is entirely correlated to garbage becoming a crisis. I don’t think Loop could have existed even five years ago because of the ask. Essentially, we’re asking CPG [consumer packaged goods] companies and retailers to fundamentally redesign packaging and accept major changes to the economics of packaged goods delivery — in other words, to treat packaging as an asset instead of a cost. Because of changing views on garbage, they’re increasingly willing to say yes to that. So what is happening now in the startup world is that more audacious ideas that solve these issues — like Loop — are on the table. Do you think existing companies are going to be able to make this shift? Or is it going to have to be new companies that are entering the market? Both. I think that we’re going to see some organizations die because of this. Others will pivot. And new companies will fill out the balance, just as with any shift. Look at tech, for instance. How many retailers survived it? Some did a great job, right? And some, like specialty big-box retailers — Toys “R” Us, Linens ’n Things, Staples in Europe, et cetera — died in the process. The key in this instance is to pivot and reinvent the organization, noting that this is easier said than done, as it takes tremendous short-term sacrifice. I believe that it won’t be industries or sectors that pivot versus die, but individual companies. Some organizations, like Nestlé, Unilever, and P&G, are taking these issues seriously and making the difficult decisions that may negatively impact the short term but lay the foundation to be relevant in the long term. Inversely, organizations — like many big food companies in the U.S. — are blind to what’s coming and will likely be overtaken by startups that are building their business models around the new reality that is emerging. When you’re having conversations with investors for TerraCycle or Loop, what are they concerned about? What do they want to know? There’s suddenly a lot more interest in this topic in the investment community, and I think investors would tell you that they really think sustainability is almost a requirement for the future. Fifteen years ago, when we were raising capital for TerraCycle, people invested because of impact and purpose; it was like they were considering giving money to an NGO. Today, investors would tell you that they really think sustainability is a requirement for the future. They are looking at the sustainability index not just as “Oh, I am feeling good about where I’m putting my money” — now it’s moved to sustainability being critical for business longevity. A lot of what we’ve seen major corporations do is market sustainability in that “purpose” bucket, and not in the “business” bucket, with pledges and other high-profile commitments. Is this changing? Are large corporations able to move from the emotional bucket to the business bucket the same way investors are? The most famous of the pledges is the Ellen MacArthur Foundation pledge, which more than 400 businesses and organizations have signed, signaling their intent to eliminate their use of new plastic. It basically says that, by 2025, they will make their products compostable, recyclable, and reusable. And they will significantly increase their use of recycled content by this date. Now, let’s be candid about why they’re pledging. Since waste has become a crisis in the past two years, many companies have come to the position that they have to solve it or they will be legislated out of it. The best way to get ahead is to make future promises, partly because you don’t have to do anything between today and the promise day, right? If everyone promises that by 2025 all this great stuff will happen, they are not really responsible in the present. I’ve talked to chief sustainability officers of some of the world’s largest CPG companies who honestly have no idea how they’re going to pull it off. They have no f—cking idea what they’re going to do and are saying things like, “Well, the industry will figure it out.” That’s scary. Here’s what I think will happen come 2025 with this particular promise. There is a difference between the promises to be “recyclable” and made from “recycled content.” In other words, most companies, via the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, have pledged that by 2025 they will be 100% recyclable and independently made from a high percentage (typically 25%) of recycled content. I think that the majority of companies will say that they made their package “technically recyclable” but that the recycling industry is to blame for not then “practically recycling” them. I think maybe 90% of companies making these promises will fail and then point to the fine print, saying, “Oh, we made our packaging recyclable, but the recycling systems don’t have the capability to recycle it today.” That’s going to create a big reckoning that will piss off consumers even more, backfiring on brands. So those 10% that succeed, how do they do that? They’re just getting ahead of it. Here’s an example: Some companies are now buying futures on recycled plastic so they know they will have the volume, which is an unheard-of thing in procuring plastic. A good example is Nestlé. The key line in their recent press release is this: “To create a market, Nestlé is therefore committed to sourcing up to 2 million metric tons of food-grade recycled plastics and allocating more than CHF 1.5 billion to pay a premium for these materials between now and 2025.” One of the things that interest me about your company is how you collaborate with so many companies. How difficult is this? Could you go it alone? We absolutely need to collaborate. These are systemic problems, and to solve the system you need multi-stakeholder collaboration. Loop could only exist with massive multi-stakeholder collaboration. There would be no other way to pull it off. And I think we need more and more of that. What makes collaborations like this work? Trade groups and consortiums don’t work. The problem with an industry group, at least in my experience, is to get the group together so they can publicly say that there is a multi-stakeholder discussion. But the outcomes are usually nothing. So how do we create true multi-stakeholder system change? Because if you’re going to change the system, you need all the stakeholders to agree. With Loop, we consciously tried to create a multi-stakeholder collaboration. And look at what happened: It’s working. We’re adding a brand every two days since we launched, and most major multinational CPG companies have joined: Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Mars, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, et cetera. We’ve also added a retailer every three weeks since our launch, including retailers around the world. Loop is live in France (via Carrefour) and the U.S. (via Kroger and Walgreens) via e-com, and is expanding in both countries to in-store later this year. It is also launching in Canada (via Loblaw), the UK (via Tesco), Germany (via a retailer we will announce in February), and Japan (via AEON), all this year. And finally, we have seen tremendously positive consumer insights — people want Loop, and they like the experience when they get access to it. I don’t see too many companies with similar models out there yet. Loop is a major systems change that requires a large coalition of multi-stakeholders. That is, no company can do it on their own — everyone has to act together. What I am seeing is a lot of groups calling us and saying, “How did you do the Loop thing, and how can we apply that type of system or process to whatever our topic may be?” They ask this because, typically, multi-stakeholder collaborations are slow and hard to drive results from. What do you tell them? I tell them that you cannot run such a platform by committee. There needs to be a “chair” that makes the decisions, even if the decisions are unpopular, and creates the urgency to make sure everything is moving forward quickly. You also set public deadlines that everyone can agree to. For example, it’s why we launched at the World Economic Forum last year — that was a deadline everyone could align on.

The next time you reach into your freezer for a pint of Haagen Dazs Amaretto Black Cherry Almond ice cream, or perhaps grab a bottle of Pantene Moisture Renewal shampoo, you might be putting your hands on something unusual in the world of consumer goods — a reusable container.   More than 150 companies have signed up to work with Loop, an innovative alternative to Amazon where the products ± as well as the box they arrive in — are all shipped back to where they came from.   We are talking reusable here, not recyclable. The cold container for ice cream, as well as the shampoo bottle, are made of durable products and designed to be returned, cleaned and reused dozens, if not hundreds of times.   Loop is the brainchild of entrepreneur Tom Szaky, who created TerraCycle as a Princeton drop out to recycle the food waste from the university dining halls into fertilizer — using worms. His company is now worth $20 million, and he’s branching out.   Customers order their products online from a list of name brand items, all delivered via UPS in a sturdy tote. The empties go back into the tote, which UPS takes back to Loop’s New Jersey processing center. They are cleaned and refilled by the suppliers to be shipped out by Loop again. Even though consumers are buying just the contents, the products cost about the same as those sold in single-use containers — in part to offset the cost of the development and manufacturing of the more durable containers, as well as cleaning and refilling.   Although the selection is limited compared to Amazon, there is still an array of well-known staples to fill up the pantry: Hellman’s mayo; Tropicana orange juice; Colgate toothpaste; Hidden Valley ranch dressing; Tide detergent, among many others — courtesy of some of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, including Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Danone, Mars Petcare and Mondelēz International.   Currently, Loop has about 25,000 customers in its test markets in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maryland and Washington, D.C., in the United States, and in Paris, France. But they are in the process of expanding across the United States and internationally, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and Japan. Watch how Szaky says he plans to grow his business into a juggernaut. Loop just recently announced it was partnering with Walgreens and Kroger to start offering its products in stores. So you can perhaps pick up that pint of that Amaretto Black Cherry Almond ice cream and return the container the very next day. Some video imagery courtesy of UPS and Loop.

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.  

Consumer giants are trying switch to other materials and convince customers to use refillable containers, but those efforts face big challenges

Here, leaders at the forefront of the industry explain why brands are more successful when they improve upon the food system as a whole. Working at the farmers market during college, Patrick Mateer was excited by what he saw: consumers and farmers connecting over eager demand for fresh and local food. But he was concerned, too, about the excess that was coming back from the market unsold with no other clear outlet, and about the problem of aligning the daily output of the farm with the weekly opportunity of the market. Attempting to solve these problems for farmers, and meet consumer demand for local, Mateer created Seal the Seasons, a frozen fruit brand hitting the market with an unprecedented model. “We wanted to replicate that same local feel in the grocery store by introducing lines of locally sourced, locally frozen, and locally sold products,” says the company’s COO Alex Piasecki. That means contracting with local farmers, freezing the goods locally and distributing only to markets in the region—all within about a 300-mile radius. On the shelf, the frozen, bagged fruit Seal the Seasons brings to market, is nothing new. The innovation demonstrated is in the way it serves farmers, communities, consumers and retailers behind the product. And this may be the next wave of innovation in the natural products space. “It’s not always about engineering something new,” Piasecki says, “because we can always engineer something new. It’s all about understanding the story and who you’re supporting with your dollars, more so than what you’re buying.” In many ways, this view is the core and founding ethos of the natural and organic products industry, and the influence the industry exerts throughout the U.S. food system is undeniable. But even as innovation and competition in this now $219 billion industry reaches a fever pitch, many experts witness an ironic stagnation in meaningful change. Does the market need more flavor choices in popcorn or more format choices for matcha? Maybe. But what the world urgently needs is innovations that work to regenerate the systems—ecological, financial, cultural and climatic—so threatened by rampant consumption. “We brought this just amazing innovation to the food industry,” Robyn O’Brien says about the natural products industry, “and we’ve reinvented these toxic products, brought them back into this wholesome, nutritious product.” The author, speaker and vice president of impact investing firm rePlant Capital has been tracking the industry throughout her career. “But then we just got stuck, and we kind of kept trying to reinvent ourselves on that wheel. And it just became a wheel that, instead of moving us forward, started spinning in place.” Too much of the industry today, O’Brien believes, is focused on the end-user product. “But if you think about everything it takes to get there, we need innovation at every level, from distribution to packaging, to transportation.” Seal the Seasons may not hit every level, but it is pioneering something meaningfully different in distribution. The company has now replicated its model in six growing regions across the country, working with nearly 60 farmers and selling frozen fruit in 3,000 grocery stores, proving that a local focus doesn’t inhibit a company’s national growth potential. There are clear ecological benefits to its model (Piasecki says each two pounds of fruit eliminates one pound of greenhouse gases when compared to average frozen food), but the motivation for the brand is really in the people it serves: the farmers struggling in a global market, the retailers attempting to satisfy demand for local, and the consumers seeking that local product—whether to support the farmer they met at the farmers market or just to buy American. It’s only going to become more important, Piasecki predicts, as consumers increasingly care “not only what their food is, but where it’s coming from, what it’s treated with, who’s growing it, are they paid a fair wage?” Quality matters, too, and he believes Seal the Seasons delivers on this. But he distinguishes between brand promise and product promise, which is just a matter of quality standards. “Consumers want that product to be great,” he says about the interaction of those promises. “They want that product to be sold to them at a value they think is fair, and they want that product to be produced in a way that is fair to everyone.”

Taking a step back

TerraCycle CEO Tom Szaky distinguishes between two different types of innovation. Even when trying to solve big problems, innovators often employ what he calls “twist innovation,” wherein tweaks are made to existing product concepts to make incremental improvements. What inspires Szaky, is what he calls “step back” innovation. By stepping back to look at the problem being solved, Szaky says, innovations can stimulate monumental leaps into the future. “Uber’s a good example, right? It’s not a better cab or a better price, it’s thinking about the concept of mobility within what resources are on the road today,” he says. “Or taking an arbitrary example of oral hygiene, I take a step back and first understand why it is the problem of oral hygiene even exists, what are the causes?” That, he says, is when innovators start thinking about not just the object, but the way the consumer receives it and interactes with it. Once the source problem is understood, he says, “you may land on an answer that doesn’t look like a toothbrush at all.” That would be a unique market advantage compared to a toothbrush “incrementally twisted” to feature new bristles or a better handle. “And I think that’s where you’re going to get the biggest opportunity to succeed, especially as an entrepreneur or a smaller company.”

Package deal

TerraCycle exists to eliminate the very idea of waste through collection and remanufacture programs. This intersects with the food and household goods industry on packaging. After all, even as islands of single-use plastics continue to pollute the oceans, “packaged” remains the middle name of the CPG world. (Indeed, TerraCycle’s programs include working with P&G to package the world’s top-selling shampoo, Head & Shoulders, in recycled ocean plastic.) For TerraCycle’s most ambitious program to date, the team applied a step back approach to packaging, asking why packaging exists and how those needs can be met without giving in to single-use materials. This step back also included a look back. “In the past, garbage didn’t exist,” Szaky says. “Things were reusable, things were beautiful, things were more durable, things were higher quality.” All major positives, he says, especially when compared to the disposable, low-quality packages we use today that don’t often deliver a particularly good consumer experience beyond the most basic function. The exploration resulted in Loop, a bold plan to create packaging that is both durable and appealing to consumers and can be returned, cleaned and reused—not recycled—at the same value level again and again, and to build it with the biggest players in household goods: P&G, Nestle, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Clorox and Unilever. This required “thinking beyond the three-dimensional design of the product and the two-dimensional artwork that adorns it,” Szaky says, and tackling the system behind it. Each of these brands, and others, are participating to create what Szaky calls an ecosystem, and thereby a critical mass of offerings consumers can interact with—something he believes is required to create the momentum necessary for Loop to be successful. Presently the programs are handled by mail, but eventually will involve major retailers selling goods and collecting empties. In other words, not settling for a new twist on packaging has the potential to be, Szaky says, “a monumental reinvention of the very concept of that idea in a very futuristic way.” The program is off to a good start. Since its launch early this year—with a few hundred products in a handful of cities—Project Loop has engaged over 10,000 consumers. “The world is falling deeply out of love with packaging,” Szaky says. “Seeing the negative, losing the delight on the positives, it’s an existential crisis for packaging at the moment, which is the perfect time to open and question all the foundations around it.” Any potential success is a product of timing, Szaky says. “If you go back to the 1970s and 1980s, people were so in love with [packaging], you couldn’t foundationally have those discussions, because people didn’t see the problems. They had the love but not the negative.” Now, he says, everything is open to change. “It’s a massive ask of these brands,” Szaky says, “to ask them to reinvent everything: how they account for physical product itself, how it’s filled, the entire economic backbone to it, so on and so forth. But now with this particular time where we are, those conversations are on the table. Enthusiastically.”

Now’s the time

Innovation, of course, is always a question of timing. Changes in the collective consciousness make way for new opportunities to solve more fundamental problems. Are sufficient numbers of consumers eager enough to embrace the motivation behind the innovation? Are we ready to reassess some of the fundamental assumptions of capitalism? “In a way, it’s the same problem Wall Street has, where it’s just this insatiable drive to consistently be on your earnings model, quarter after quarter after quarter,” says O’Brien. “And when you get into that mindset of demanded, extracted growth, we pay a price.” O’Brien would like the industry to go deeper, like Seal the Seasons and TerraCycle have. “The invitation is to really think of the entire supply chain, the entire sourcing process, and think about ways we can do this in a smarter, more holistic way,” she says. “That’s the higher calling. I mean, that’s really what we’ve been called to do in the industry, is to innovate on the food system, not just the food product.”

The home cleaning market has been saddled with lackluster growth for years. New players, with new ideas, hope to shake up this $3.4 billion category. The only thing worse than cleaning the home is purchasing cleaning products, a process that wastes time and resources, according to detractors. No wonder that the newest ideas in home cleaning have less to do with cleaning spills than cleaning up the buying process. While few people admit to enjoy cleaning their homes, there’s no denying that the home cleaning category, when taken together, is a giant business. According to IRI, household cleaner sales in grocery, drug, mass market, military and select club and dollar retailers, rose 1.2% to more than $3.46 billion for the 52 weeks ended Sept. 8, 2019. Of course, some segments performed better than others. For example, all-purpose cleaner/disinfectant sales rose 4.7% to nearly $1.3 billion, but national brand managers should temper their enthusiasm, considering that private label sales surged more than 35% during the period. Oven and appliance cleaners and degreasers also outpaced overall industry growth, rising 8.3% to more than $203 million. The category has been a boon for Procter & Gamble, as its sales jumped more than 58% during the period, according to IRI. Meanwhile, sales were flat in multimillion-dollar categories like toilet bowl cleaners/deodorizers. But with sales limping along with a growth rate lower than the population growth, some entrepreneurs insist that the category is ripe for dramatic change through simplification. According to the founders of Truman’s, a new line of cleaning products, the cleaning process has become extremely complicated with a variety of formulas, SKUs, colors and scents. Their answer is four spray cleaners that work effectively on a variety of surfaces. There’s Everything And The Kitchen Sink kitchen cleaner, Floors Truly floor cleaner, More Shower To You bathroom cleaner and The Glass is Always Cleaner glass cleaner. What’s more, all four formulas come in concentrated cartridges. Consumers fill and refill spray bottles using water and cleaner formulas that are about the size of a Lifesavers package. It all adds up to a big savings in packaging and shipping costs—issues that have moved front and center with consumers. For Truman’s co-founders, reinventing an existing business model is nothing new. Jon Bostock and Alex Reed co-founded Truman’s after shaking up the staid industrial fan business. Bostock is the former president and COO of Big Ass Fans (BAF), which designs and sells large fans and lighting systems for industrial, commercial and farm use. Reed was BAF’s global marketing director. BAF was sold at the end of 2017, but Bostock and Reed wanted to do something entrepreneurial together. “We believe in the direct-to-consumer model and innovative products, and we felt that cleaning had been left behind,” Reed told Happi. “The supply chain is broken; products are primarily water, so companies are basically shipping and warehousing a small amount of active.” Problems continued once palettes are unloaded and products are placed on retail store shelves, according to Reed. “With so many unnecessary cleaners and fragrances, it is all very confusing,” he insisted. “No brand was born in the digital age of listening to the consumer. The category needed to be reimagined throughout the value chain.” Truman’s is a startup, but in its short existence company executives realized that consumers have an appetite for easy-to-use products that are “non-toxic.” People like to engage with us via social media and our website (www.Trumans.com),” insists Reed. “Household cleaning is a sleepy category and it doesn’t have to be.” In fact, Truman’s woke up Henkel to the possibility of a fun, DTC model. Two months ago, the multinational took a stake in the Louisville, KY-based startup. With the minority investment in Truman’s, Henkel is taking over the role as lead investor in a seed round totaling $5 million. “Convenience and sustainability today are top-of-mind for an increasing number of today’s consumers and we continuously advance our portfolio while addressing these topics. Specifically, when it comes to packaging, Henkel pursues ambitious targets for sustainable packaging to promote a circular economy and reduce plastic waste,” said Robert Günther, corporate director, Henkel Ventures, in statement. “We look forward to gaining insights from the Truman’s team, as well as supporting them with our expertise and resources.” The feeling is definitely mutual, said Reed, who noted that Henkel has broad manufacturing capabilities and international distribution. “We wanted to do more than take a paycheck,” he recalled. “Henkel has expertise in international trade and compliance, and has new technology, too. Now we have access to it.” Will Henkel ultimately offer the founders a buyout? Not necessarily. “Henkel’s venture arm made the investment and they want to see the value of the investment increase; this isn’t an acquisition nor is it a path to acquisition,” explained Reed. “We aren’t seeking new funds at this time, but it shows that the multinationals are interested (in a new model).” New from P&G Multinationals want new, whether its home grown or brought inside. Procter & Gamble expanded the Mr. Clean franchise earlier this year with two new formulas. Clean Freak is said to have three times the cleaning power of conventional all-purpose cleaners, and acts on contact to remove 100% of dirt, grease and grime leaving nothing behind but a perfect shine, according to Mary Johnson, a spokesperson for Procter & Gamble. The brand also launched Mr. Clean Magic Eraser Sheets that have Magic Eraser’s cleaning power but are thin and flexible. “Recently, we’ve focused on designing more plant-based products, to meet consumer needs and help increase our use of renewable materials,” explained Johnson. “We’ve introduced a plant-based portfolio in Fabric Care, with Tide purclean, Downy Nature Blends, Dreft purtouch and Gain Botanicals, and we’ve launched Home Made Simple, a plant-based home care & cleaning line designed to meet EPA Safer Choice and USDA Standards.” The Home Made Simple line includes detergent, fabric softener, multipurpose cleaner, hand soap and dish soap. According to P&G research, about 8% of consumers are committed to a lifestyle that includes natural products, but up to 76% of consumers are interested in trying such products. About 24% of consumers aren’t interested in naturals. Cleaner products that help consumers clean their homes has other benefits, too. “Consumers across the country are increasingly tapping into the mental clarity and peace of mind that comes from not only a clean home, but from the act of cleaning itself,” observed Johnson. “Most consumers are aware of the physical benefits of a good clean, but more and more consumers are turning to cleaning as a way to clear their minds, take a pause from the hectic pace of daily life and use that as a moment of ‘me time.’” Johnson pointed to the new phenomenon of “clean with me” videos has caught fire on YouTube. These videos, which literally take the viewer around a stranger’s home as they clean it, have been viewed more than 200 million times, with more than 5,000 new video uploads in the past few months alone. She told Happi that for P&G brands, sustainability comes to life in everyday moments, like washing laundry and doing dishes. “For example, as more and more people strive to adopt resource-efficient habits, it becomes increasingly important to use products designed to perform in the toughest conditions. If you’re washing clothes in shorter, colder cycles, you need a detergent like Tide, that’s been designed with a specific enzyme to clean in the quickest, coldest wash. If you want to use less water to get clean dishes, you need a product that doesn’t require a pre-rinse, like Cascade, which lets you skip the rinse and save up to 15 gallons of water per load. If you’re using a lower performing product and something doesn’t get clean, chances are you’ll compensate for that by washing it again—this time with more water or more product, driving your footprint up. So that’s why we design products like Tide and Cascade specifically to help save water, time and energy, without sacrificing the clean you need.” At the same time, P&G is aware that the way its products are made matters too. So, the company makes its brands at facilities that use 100% renewable wind power electricity and send zero manufacturing waste to landfill. “We’ve helped the industry tackle important challenges like the creation of a recycling stream for colored PET, and we’re working to find alternatives to plastics, like Cascade cartons made from 100% recycled wood pulp,” said Johnson. Finally, P&G is being transparent about what’s in its products and why. Johnson noted that P&G was one of the first firms to participate in the online SmartLabel system, where you can find information about all of P&G’s fabric and home care products listed. “Today, we working to incorporate more of this information onto our packaging to further our transparency efforts and enable you to make informed choices,” she said. SC Johnson has been the leader in ingredient transparency for years. In September, SC Johnson released its 2018/19 Sustainability Report. During the past year, the company has removed 1.7 million kilograms of plastic from primary packaging. Furthermore, 94% of the company’s plastic packaging is now recyclable, reusable or compostable. Recently, SC Johnson let its membership in the Plastics Industry Association expire. In a statement, SCJ said it strongly believes governments should be able to democratically ban plastics if that’s what its citizens want. “Leaving the Plastics Industry Association was a difficult situation because we respect the work they’re doing on recycling and plastic innovation,” a company spokesperson told Happi. “However, its connection to the American Progressive Bag Alliance became confusing. SC Johnson is committed to packaging innovation and post-consumer recycled content and you’ll see more from us in the future.” Are You in the Loop? Whether startup or multinational, nearly every FMCG company is determined to reduce its packaging footprint. Last year, more than 250 companies, including PepsiCo and H&M, pledged to cut back on their use of plastic, including making all of their packaging recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025. Packaging is the hot-button issue of the moment and TerraCycle, the creator of Loop, is pushing all the right buttons. Launched in May, Loop is billed as a global circular shopping platform that’s designed to eliminate the idea of waste by transforming the products and packaging of everyday items from single-use to durable, multi-use, feature-packed designs, according to TerraCycle, which developed Loop more than a year ago, introduced the concept at Davos and has expanded from three US states to 11 in six months. Loop is also available in Paris and, most recently, London. “The growth and acceptance has been wonderful,” said Anthony Rossi, VP-global business development, Loop. “We are adding nearly a brand a day.” At press time, Loop offered 150 products and Rossi expected that number to climb to 350 by year-end. So, who’s in the Loop? Well-known companies such as Clorox, P&G, Seventh Generation and Unilever offer an array of cleaners, detergents and personal care products in reusable, returnable, often stainless-steel packaging. Loop delivers products to its members’ doors and picks up the packaging when it’s depleted. Products are reordered online and after seven or eight uses, The Loop process turns positive for the environment, according to TerraCycle. For now, consumers can order products at Loopstore.com, and Kroger and Walgreens are the official retail partners. Loop is just getting started, but there have already been a lot of lessons learned, according to Rossi. “Faster moving products, such as snacks and beverage, create a lot of engagement with consumers,” he told Happi. “On the home care side, autodish pods and all-purpose cleaners have been performing very well.” Getting in the Loop isn’t easy. Suppliers are making heavy investment in packaging and filling lines, but as Rossi notes, “they wouldn’t do it if the reaction wasn’t positive and there wasn’t demand for our products.” Procter & Gamble was one of the first companies to join the Loop program. P&G designed packaging that is both reusable and recyclable for Febreze One, an ultra-durable package for Cascade and a stainless-steel refillable package for Tide Purclean. All three of these solutions are designed for consumer convenience and reuse, and to enable ongoing learning within the new platform, according to Johnson. “While it’s still very early in the test markets, we have seen that consumer appeal increases when the product offering broadens, so we are encouraging more brands to join Loop as we all learn together in this important space,” she said. Coming Next Month A different kind of packaging issue was front and center earlier this year. The household cleaning industry won a key battle in August when the Supreme Court of the State of New York ruled in favor of a lawsuit filed by the Household & Commercial Product Association (HCPA) and the American Cleaning Institute (ACI) against the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) attempts to force cleaning product manufacturers to disclose chemical ingredients and identify any ingredients that appear on authoritative lists of chemicals of concern on their websites. The Court found that the NYSDEC Disclosure Program is “null and void” and remitted the matter back to NYSDEC with the directive to comply with State Administrative Procedure Act. “It was a huge decision,” recalled Steve Caldeira, president and CEO, HCPA. “Any time you litigate against a state it is a big undertaking.” According to Caldeira, the ruling underscores HCPA’s successful strategy to collaborate with other stakeholders on key issues. “The HCPA has a good reputation of being collaborative and inclusive. Engagement and collaboration is our mantra and we will continue to do so.” At the same time, however, Caldeira observed that the association is willing to go it alone when it involves critical issues. Two years ago, when California passed the Cleaning Product Right to Know Act, HCPA engaged in intense negotiations with NGOs and other stakeholders, when many other associations, were neutral on the issue. HCPA also played a leading role in the reauthorization of the Pesticide Registration Improvement Act (PRIA), which was signed by President Donald J. Trump this Spring and will remain in effect through 2023. Also this year, HCPA earned the 2019 Safer Choice Partner of the Year from the US Environmental Protection Agency. “To win this award is humbling and we are very grateful. It speaks to the vision and mission of our board and the engagement of our membership,” said Caldeira. “We have a lot of big wins, because we have a talented staff, an engaged board and are focused on the right issues.” Of course, more issues are on the horizon. For example, the California legislature adjourned before acting on the Circular Economy and Pollution Reduction Act, which would require all single-use packaging sold in California on or after Jan. 1, 2030 to be recyclable or compostable. HCPA member companies are part of the Alliance To End Plastic Waste, a group made up of some the leading suppliers and marketers in the home came industry. These companies have pledged $1.5 billion over the next five years to solve some of the issues surrounding plastic. “Plastic is an issue that consumers care about and one that we must address,” said Caldeira. “Whatever we can do as companies and trade associations to become smarter and innovate around plastic is important.” During XPand 2019, the HCPA Annual Meeting, several important issues will be in focus. The event takes place in Fort Lauderdale, FL, Dec. 8-11, 2019. The overarching theme of the Annual Meeting is innovation and, for the first time, the HCPA will honor members with its Innovation Awards, which will be granted in five categories—ingredients, sustainability, consumer communication, technology and game-changing innovation. Annual Meeting programming will center on operational excellence, consumer education and sustainability stewardship. There will be sessions on consumer habits, ecommerce, retailer updates, supply chain disruption and diversity. The keynote speaker is Nancy Giordano, a strategic futurist and corporate strategist who has guided transformation projects with The Coca Cola Company, Brinker International, Sprint, Nestle, Acumen, Energizer, Mercedes Benz and many other Fortune 500 companies. On Dec. 11, HCPA will host a Preservation Summit that will feature presentations by Beth Ann Browne of DuPont, Tony Rook and Doug Mazeffa of Sherwin Williams, Petra Kern and Jeff Van Komen of Procter & Gamble, and other key stakeholders to further the discussion about the benefits of product preservation. According to HCPA, the goal of the Summit is to help inform legislators, retailers, decision makers and NGOs about the benefits of product preservation by developing scientific and consumer-friendly data and educational content that can be used to communicate effectively with a range of target audiences. In 2020, HCPA staff will continue to collaborate with other groups to find a solution at the national level regarding ingredient communication. “We will continue to the use the California model for a national solution. Patchwork regulations can be onerous and costly,” observed Caldeira. “We need common sense solutions. We will continue to work with the Grocery Manufacturers Association, ACI and others to find a solution. There are a lot of great things going on, but we have to stay focused, collaborate with NGOs and like-minded trade groups.” The strategy is paying off, as HCPA membership and revenue continue to grow slowly and steadily. During his three years at the helm of the association, HCPA has been rebranded, developed economic data to better tell its story on Capitol Hill and at the state level, updated its strategic plan and and expanded its board and officers. “There is growing interest among companies to have a voice as we expand,” Caldeira concluded. “If you stay stagnant, you get left behind.”

It’s been nine months since the startup Loop, brainchild of TerraCycle founder and CEO Tom Szaky, took the world by storm with its zero-waste circular delivery service. If you’re like us at TriplePundit, you’re probably wondering how it is doing as it nears the one-year mark. While the company does not disclose its total number of subscribers, Szaky gave a candid update at last week’s Bloomberg Sustainable Business Summit in New York.

Adding one brand per day

First announced at the World Economic Forum in January, Loop made its initial start with pilots in metro New York and Paris. Ever since, Szaky says, business has been quickly growing. Today, Loop is available in select areas in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maryland and Washington, D.C. It is in the process of expanding throughout the United States, as well as the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and Japan, Szaky said. And with comments such as “When is Loop coming to Illinois….I can’t wait!” sprinkled across Loop’s Instagram account, it seems expansion can’t come soon enough for many. Loop’s value proposition is enabling the consumer “to responsibly consume a variety of commonly used products from leading consumer brands in customized, brand-specific durable packaging delivered in a specially designed reusable shipping tote.” When finished with the product, the packaging is collected, cleaned, refilled and reused. There are no monthly membership fees or subscriptions, although customers do pay a refundable one-time deposit to borrow the reusable container. “Loop will not just eliminate the idea of packaging waste, but greatly improve the product experience and shopping convenience,” Szaky said at the launch. The initial coalition included 28 partners such as Procter & Gamble, Unilever, PepsiCo, Mondelez International, Nestlé, Danone and UPS.  Today, the list has grown to 42 partners selling brands such as Häagen-Dazs, Tide, Tropicana and Colgate. Essential to Loop’s success is its ability to offer consumers the same choice they would find in brick-and-mortar retail stores, and the Loop management team knew that quickly scaling up offerings was key. According to Szaky, Loop is now adding approximately one new brand per day. The brands themselves seem to be having fun with new packaging design, such as Procter & Gamble, whose ProPantene shampoo and conditioner containers are emblazoned with “I Reuse….I Love the Oceans.”

Shoppers love ice cream from Loop, but not for the reason expected

While the products do come shipped in reusable Loop containers, critics on social media have pointed out that some of the products that Loop sells—including detergent pods and wipes—contain plastic that is not recyclable. But it turns out that this may not be relevant to the majority of Loop consumers: Only a third of Loop subscribers joined the service based on sustainability concerns, Szaky said; the majority claim to have joined because of the model itself, including its convenience, something that even Szaky found surprising—and, it seems, a little frustrating given his zero-waste zeal. To date, the company says beverages in glass bottles such as Evian and Tropicana have been among the top-selling products among Loop subscribers in France. In the United States, top sellers include Clorox wipes, Cascade dishwasher detergent tabs, Pantene shampoo and Häagen-Dazs ice cream.

A few habits that throw this circular economy model for a loop

Another interesting learning that Szaky shared was that while Loop customers want similar prices for products they would buy in traditional stores, they have not been price sensitive to the deposit fees. “It’s exciting that consumers are willing to temporarily invest in the reusable containers,” he remarked. While temporary, the cost of the containers, in some cases, are not inexpensive. Take two of the top-selling products: The container for Clorox Wipes requires a $10 deposit, while the deposit for the Häagen-Dazs ice cream container is $5. Only time will tell if the model will continue to be successful, especially as more and more companies, from Unilever to Nestlé, pledge to reduce their use of plastic packaging in the next 10 to 20 years. For now, however, this service seems to be a model in high demand.