Beyond Recycling: Policy to Achieve Circular Waste Management

Waste collection and recycling services are some of the most essential functions of government to keep cities clean and promote public health. For more than 50 years, local governments have championed efforts to improve the environmental sustainability of waste management services by establishing curbside recycling programs, investing in sorting facilities, capturing methane and other greenhouse gases from landfills and much…

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US Media Release: 140 Billion drink containers wasted nationally every year

MEDIA RELEASE 140 BILLION DRINKS CONTAINERS WASTED NATIONALLY EVERY YEAR 29 April 2021 Elizabeth Balkan elizabeth.balkan@reloopplatform.org Published Reloop [1] data [2] shows that more than 140 billion empty drinks containers – glass bottles, PET plastic bottles and metal cans – were wasted [3] across the United States in 2019. over 74 billion were PET bottles,…

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Deposit return systems are key to solving the plastic paradox

As consumer demand for recycled polyethylene terephthalate (rPET) grows and governments continue to set regulations to increase use of recycled materials, a plastic paradox is created: there isn’t enough high-quality material being collected and recycled for manufacturers to meet the increased demand. In this article for Waste Dive, our Director of Americas Elizabeth Balkan explains how deposit…

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Trilateral webinar on measuring recycled content

Given increasing interest from legislators around the world on mandating recycled content in products and packaging, Reloop hosted a private webinar to bring the knowledge gained from the European Commission’s work on this subject. This presentation is from Joe Papineschi and Simon Hann from Eunomia Research and Consulting. For more information, please contact Reloop’s Chief…

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In Our Opinion: Stay the course toward reusable packaging

Health authorities say reusable packaging poses no more risk of spreading coronavirus than single-use packaging, but the plastics industry is still trying to use COVID-19 to derail progress on reducing single-use plastics. In this article, Samantha Millette and Clarissa Morawski look at the impact that the coronavirus pandemic has had on reusable packaging systems, and…

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Joint Policy Paper on Reusable Packaging & COVID-19

On June 4th, Zero Waste Europe and Reloop released a joint policy paper to address the situation of reusable packaging and refillable systems in light of the  COVID-19 pandemic. While industry uses this current health crisis to continue pushing for single-use products and packaging, there is no evidence that disposable packaging contributes to the spread…

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Reloop Takes Part in Webinar on ‘The New Battle in Single-Use Plastics’

On Thursday, April 30, 2020, Reloop’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Clarissa Morawski took part in a webinar on “The New Battle in Single-Use Plastics” organised and hosted by Environmental Defence Canada (EDC). In this third episode of EDC’s Recovery Series webinars, Clarissa was joined by EDC’s Executive Director Tim Gray and Plastics Program Manager Ashley…

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Dispatches from Europe: Trying to define ‘single-use plastic’

Over the last few years, plastics have very quickly become the public face of the waste pollution crisis. The quantities of plastics that are littered or leaked into the environment, seas and oceans each year is staggering (5 to 13 million metric tons per year). Europe alone produces 25.8 million metric tons of plastic waste…

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