The unsung solution for our waste crisis: Reuse

Figuring out what should go into your curbside waste bins is hardly straightforward.

Consider your single-use coffee cup — the one holding the latte you’re going to drink as you drive to work.

It’s paper, right? So it can be recycled?

Los Angeles knows how to weather a crisis — or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to build a city for everyone.

Wrong. It has a plastic lining that paper recyclers won’t touch.

Or what about the compostable produce bag you used to hold the few broccoli heads you purchased from the bulk bin at your local grocery store?

Composters don’t want it. The plastic — even when made from non-fossil fuel sources such as kelp, corn or sugar cane — often contains additives that composters say can contaminate the soil. And they say it doesn’t decompose completely.

Teresa Leong takes her food and paper waste to Cottonwood Urban Farm in Panorama City for composting. Some of it is brought back in a bucket, right, which she uses to grow several native plants on a weed-covered strip of land near the Los Angeles River in Studio City.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

The waste landscape is a confusing nightmare that even folks well-versed in waste management struggle with — especially when you consider that each city, county and municipality in California has its own rules about what goes where.

It’s why many people are hoping the reuse movement will grow — a movement that asks people, restaurants and stores to create food-ware items that can be returned, washed and reused.

It’s estimated that 50 billion paper coffee cups are thrown away in the United States alone. And in California, only 9% of single-use plastics is recycled.

In small, geographically contained settings — such as stadiums, arenas and conference centers — re-usable food ware items have been used with success. In Los Angeles, Crypto.com arena and the Peacock Theater have participated in reusable food ware programs, with the company r.World, since 2024.

In an attempt to see if such programs could be implemented at a broader scale, a consortium promoted and financed by such unlikely sponsors as Starbucks, PepsiCo, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, launched a 12-week reuse pilot program in the Northern California city of Petaluma, last summer.

According to a report issued by the consortium, called Closed Loop Partners, the program got buy-in from 30 stores, including Dunkin, Habit Burger and Peets coffee. The food establishments offered consumers a reusable purple plastic beverage cup — with no deposit or added charge — that could be dropped off at purple collection bins around the city after the item was used. The cups were then washed, inspected and delivered back to participating stores.

The organizers claim the project was a success. More than 50% of the cups were returned, which organizers say surpasses the “environmental break-even point” — meaning they were better for the environment than single-use cups. That’s even when you include the water and energy costs required to transport the cups, clean them and transport them again.

And, they say, 24,000 cups that were not returned to the purple bins were recovered by the local recycling company.

“We learned that the biggest driver of returns was being part of a community-wide solution,” said Carolina Lobel, senior director at Closed Loop Partners’ Center for the Circular Economy. “Instead of working with the traditional monetary incentive, we focused on building up pride and empowering everyone to do the right thing. And they did because it’s what their neighbors and their entire community was doing.”

She also said the organizers were surprised at how quickly people embraced the new behavior, and saw return rates accelerate week to week.

The group will soon be launching another program in a larger California city — this time in Southern California.