Sip, return, repeat: ‘Nation’s first’ citywide reusable cup launches as chains look to shrink waste footprint

Backers hope the new pilot project in Petaluma, California, will stop hundreds of thousands of single-use plastic cups from littering landfills

Starting on Monday, more than 30 restaurants and coffee shops in the city of Petaluma will begin serving and accepting deposits of multi-use beverage cups. (Petaluma Reusable Cup Project)

A California town has launched what backers describe as the nation’s first citywide reusable cup program in a bid to cut down on landfill waste.

Starting on Monday, more than 30 restaurants and coffee shops in the city of Petaluma will begin serving and accepting deposits of multi-use beverage cups, including major chains such as Starbucks, Taco Bell and Dunkin' Donuts.

The purpose-built insulated vessels can be dropped off in bins across the city before being collected, sanitized and delivered back to restaurant owners to re-enter the food chain. Other businesses joining the pilot project include KFC, Target, Circle K and Peet's Coffee, as well as local fixtures such as the Petaluma Pie Company, The Bagel Mill, and Avid Coffee.

"Transitioning to returnable packaging systems is a critical part of reducing single-use packaging waste, and we need to focus on supporting the operations behind it," said Brittany Gamez of the reusable packaging company Muuse, which will operate the program.

"It is through initiatives like this that we can identify what is needed to operationalize shared systems at this level and inform how reuse is implemented at scale."

The cups can be returned at one of 60 drop-off bins across the California city, including inside restaurants (Petaluma Reusable Cup Project)

About 50 billion single-use plastic cups are bought and thrown away each year across the US, according to the project's main backer, Closed Loop Partners.

The renewables-focused investment firm says it wants to gather data on how many people actually return the cups and whether they really do reduce their operators' environmental impact.

Although individual companies or groups of companies have tested reusable container programs before, Closed Loop says this is the first time such a project has been implemented across an entire city.

Other cities in the San Francisco Bay Area, such as San Francisco and Berkeley, have tried to encourage reusable containers and dishes via taxes or funding deals, but have not attempted anything like this.

Projects backers chose Petaluma – a picturesque city of about 60,000 people in California's wine-rich Sonoma County, just north of the Bay – due to its dense, highly walkable cluster of downtown restaurants and its past enthusiasm for similar experiments.

"One cup doesn’t consume a massive amount of resources to produce and dispose, but when thousands of cups are used daily... that waste accumulates in a significant way," assistant city manager Patrick Carter told The San Francisco Chronicle. "Reuse is the solution.”