Reuse vs Single-use: Economics

Transitioning from single-use to reuse creates significant benefits for business, including better customer experiences and insights, brand loyalty and cost savings.

Over 500 businesses have signed the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastics Economy Commitment to move “where relevant” from single-use to reusable packaging by 2025. While those commitments come mainly from large brands, in this section, we provide examples where change is also coming from restaurants – influenced by their customers and by citizen activism – and entrepreneurs innovating new models for food delivery.

Restaurants in the U.S. spent $21.9 billion on purchasing food service products in 2019. Going reusable presents innovative new business opportunities and ways to save money. Replacing just 20% of single-use plastic packaging with reusable alternatives offers an opportunity worth at least $10 billion.

Replacing just 20% of single-use plastic packaging with reusable alternatives offers an opportunity worth at least $10 billion.

The economics of reuse over single-use are clear.

The evidence shows that reuse clearly beats single-use across a variety of metrics:

Reuse saves food service businesses money

Additional dishwashing and associated labor costs for reusables are minimal or non-existent

Reuse increases customer and operator satisfaction

Reuse builds brand loyalty

Reuse can offer valuable customer behavior data

Reuse saves communities money

Reuse creates new opportunities for entrepreneurs, investors and customers.

restaurant meals on reusable dishes from above

Clean Water Fund’s ReThink Disposable program, operating in California, has demonstrated the short-term payback of switching to reusables for on-site dining in over 50 cases of providing technical assistance to businesses and gathering cost impact data.

100% of the restaurants and institutional dining operations saved money by switching from single-use to reuse.
The average savings for a small business are between $3,000 and $22,000, with environmental benefits that include eliminating 110,000 to 225,000 packaging items per business and 1,300-2,200 lbs. of waste.

Reuse saves businesses money.

Additional dishwashing and associated labor costs for reusables are minimal or non-existent.

Fine dining and many casual restaurants already serve all their food on real and reusable food service ware. And most fast casual businesses already use some mix of reusables in their operations (for preparing food), and therefore most can accommodate the transition to reuse without much increased labor or need to expand dishwashing capacity.

Additionally, restaurants often don’t add up the labor and solid waste costs of disposing of significant amounts of disposable food serviceware, or the ongoing inventory management for disposables versus one-time purchases for on-site reusable food service ware.

Dishwashing is a serious challenge in the typical fast food restaurant, where all packaging is disposable, no commercial dishwasher is installed, and high volumes of customers are served. But retrofits or external dishwashing services can help solve the problem.

Future fast food businesses should not be designed for the throw-away model. Such change can be driven by policy.

customer receiving coffee in a reusable to go cup at a cafe

Reuse increases customer and operator satisfaction.

It can build brand loyalty and provide community benefits, such as decreased litter cleanup costs.

Customers who participated in a Starbucks reusable cup pilot project consistently stated that they preferred reusable cups. Eighty-two percent of the Starbucks customers surveyed liked the idea of reusable cups, and when asked what they liked most about them, 59% noted the environmental benefits.

haagen-Dazs ice cream in a refillable metal container

Reuse builds brand loyalty.

A company’s environmental leadership can add value to its brand. Conversely, brands associated with plastic pollution drives consumers away.

While many companies are focusing on increasing recycling, activist pressure on big brands identified as top polluters has led some to search for and invest in refillable and reusable solutions.
Companies like Unilever, Nestle, and Proctor & Gamble have invested in Loop, a company that sells products in containers designed to be returned and refilled. Coca Cola Co. is investing about $25 million to launch a returnable and refillable “universal bottle.”
Coke and Pepsi are deploying touch-screen soda fountain machines – compatible with reusable cup systems – at restaurants, cafeterias, and venues. Starbucks and McDonald’s are looking at cups and investing in innovation both in single-use materials and in moving toward reusables.

Brands that lead on switching to reuse are capitalizing on the increasing consumer support for moving away not only from plastic but from all single-use. A 2022 survey by Trivium Packaging showed that 74% of Americans are interested in buying products in refillable packaging. And there are a lot more reports showing consumer preference for reuse—we’ve rounded them up here.

Reuse offers customer behavior data-gathering benefits

Apps and other digital platforms associated with consumer participation in reusable cup and container systems allow companies to gather data on user preferences, and system performance can be tracked via digital technologies like RFID tags, QR codes, sensors, and GPS tracking.

Reuse saves communities money

The cost to local governments for managing waste in 2019 was nearly $13 billion, and litter cleanup across the U.S. cost $11.5 billion. By one estimate, food service packaging comprises 67% of street litter.

Single-use disposables add costs to businesses to buy single-use products and pay for waste hauling.
They also add costs to city governments for managing the waste.
Reuse stops waste before it starts and reduces costs for businesses and local governments to manage all the waste. Reusables cut the number of single-use items that end up in the waste management system. The number of times a reusable product is used dictates the amount of waste reduced.