With EPR fees significantly increasing the cost of single-use packaging, Victoria Baker, Discovery Manager at Ecosurety, says we are faced with a key question: is now the time to make reusable packaging the mainstream?
There have been many high-profile and well-publicised reusable packaging trials, each building our knowledge of what needs to be true for reuse to scale successfully.
However, there is an absence of a cohesive solution, but not for lack of trying. The momentum behind reuse and refill is growing but mobilising it at scale remains a challenge.
At the Global Reuse Summit in March 2025 – hosted by City to Sea in Bristol and supported by Ecosurety – industry leaders came together to explore how real progress can be made.
Among them was Sarah Greaves, Packaging Sustainability Manager at Princes, who emphasised that collaboration and practicality were key.
She praised the ‘sharing of innovations in reuse through to discussions on the challenges of making it work at scale’ and recognised the ‘energy in the room, that we all need to better understand the possibilities and benefits in moving from our current models to reusable systems’.
With this genuine dedication, high-level enthusiasm for collaboration and oft-cited evidence of consumer demand, it is perhaps surprising that trials remain short-term.
Whilst supermarkets are quietly withdrawing their refill stations, many coffee cup schemes are struggling to reach the volumes necessary to deliver a significant dent in the 3.2 billion single-use cups used annually in the UK.
With the public and business landscape supposedly so rife for mainstream reuse, why is it yet to materialise?
Collective action at scale
Trials are a necessity as making the business case for a wide-spread switch to reusable packaging systems without supporting data would be impossible.
However, by their nature, trials are small-scale and unlikely to have the resources and backing from brands and retailers engaged in them to push them further.
They are therefore unable to benefit from economies of scale. Low-volume outcomes are expensive and discourage future uptake.
We are now positioned to apply learnings and take bolder action, committing investment and volume, backed by meaningful targets and collective action. But this will not happen overnight.
Brands and retailers often engage enthusiastically with trials as they don’t require a large-scale system change. But if we believe reuse can only succeed through a full-scale transformation in one go, we risk constant failure.
Single-use systems took decades to become financially efficient. Reuse systems need the same opportunity – to grow steadily, build volume area by area, and prove their value in practice. Only then can we scale up with confidence.
Consider busy consumer lives
Despite statistics that 69% of us are calling for reuse and refill targets, there is little evidence that consumers will actually choose reuse and refill options.
With the busy lives we lead, exacerbated by the cost of living and vast choice available, will an everyday consumer take the time to log into an app or deposit packaging in a specified bin to get back money they didn’t want to spend in the first place, when a familiar, single-use option is available?
An educated guess is no, and certainly not consistently. We must also consider the time and priorities of the individuals providing our food, drink and other fast moving consumer goods.
Take coffee. According to research by Nescafé, the average UK coffee drinker consumes their first coffee of the day at 9:01AM.
Although the majority of coffee will be consumed outside coffee shops, there is still a high volume of people purchasing coffee at the busiest point in the day.
A Barista’s priority will be to make the best coffee, and quickly. A consumer wants to drink their coffee. Add in the need to explain, understand and decide to use a reusable cup, and suddenly this convenient, caffeine-fuelled journey slows down significantly.
The bold solution needs to be that this journey, starting with ordering and ending with the disposal of the cup shortly after purchase, is unchanged for the consumer.
Were there no choice, no deposit, and no different journey to return packaging, the only barriers to reuse would be cost for the producers which, at scale and over time, decrease.
Lead, don’t follow, legislation
For the most part, this echoes what we in the reuse and refill space have been projecting for a while now: we need to collaborate, standardise, remove friction and cost, consider consumers and give reuse and refill systems real time to scale-up. We should be bold, and we should act now.
Thanks to some fantastic, pioneering reuse and refill work, we are fully equipped to know what works and what does not. We also know that EPR will increase costs of single-use packaging, supporting the argument that reuse will prove sustainable, both environmentally and economically.
Currently, a paper cup costs less than a reusable one, but these prices are not comparable. The cost of a reusable cup considers production, collection and washing costs. The cost of a single use cup does not have to consider the waste management… yet.
There is a first mover advantage in reuse. By spreading the EPR cost of packaging across multiple uses, brands and retailers reduce their cost exposure whilst competitors pick up a higher proportion of the waste management fees for single-use.
Taking action now enables brands and retailers to influence the design of collaborative systems and to ensure policy mechanisms support these systems.
Following legislation could prove costly in a market where competitors have established reuse propositions.
One only needs to look to France where reuse targets on sales and space have been written into public policy and 5% of EPR budgets have been ring fenced to invest in reuse.
Add in proposed mechanisms like the ‘latte levy’ in Ireland and it starts to become clear that the commercial case for reuse is starting to match the environmental one.
We must now identify elements which are integral to reuse and refill systems, collaborating to strip away unnecessary barriers.
Rather than build inefficient systems which work for individual, 2025 business models, we must standardise and scale to meet the needs of the reusable future, and we must do this now.
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