Never mind recycling, here comes the refill revolution

A permanent shipping container on the lawn wasn’t exactly what Laura Nixon had in mind when she founded her oral care business from home in 2019.

But for the former dental hygienist, who runs sustainable toothpaste company Solid, giving up a square of her Titahi Bay lawn to store the company’s reusable glass bottles was a worthwhile trade if it meant avoiding plastic waste.

“Waste is so ingrained in the dental industry that it’s hard to avoid. Every tube of toothpaste is single-use plastic,” she says. “Working as a hygienist I began to become really conscious of it, and that’s when I began thinking about what we could do, and that led to the toothpaste tablets and glass jars.”

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Single-use plastic is one of New Zealand’s persistent pollution problems, with up to half of all plastic production destined to be used only once.

As such, New Zealand moved to prohibit single-use plastic bags in 2019; followed by a ban on cotton buds and drink stirrers – a policy soon to be extended to plastic plates, bowls and cutlery.

Now, the government is also considering introducing a nationwide Container Return Scheme, in a bid to improve low recycling rates for single-use beverage containers made of plastic, aluminium, paper, and glass.

It would see consumers receive about 20 cents per container cash back to drop it off at a designated machine, and is expected to nearly double recycling rates of the 2.3 billion single-use beverage containers bought by Kiwi every year. It’s expected to start in 2025.

For some businesses, however, simply encouraging better recycling does not go far enough.

Producers like Solid are asking the Government to go even further by implementing a container reuse scheme as well, meaning that jars or bottles are de-labelled, washed and reused instead of being crushed or melted down.

“While we think it’s great what the government is doing with recycling, we think this is an epic opportunity to be looking at systems for reuse,” said Abbie Tebbutt, a business development manager at beverage company Chia Sisters, who this week launched a campaign raising awareness about container reuse called Refill Revolution.

Currently, the ABC Swappa Crate system for beer is the country’s largest reusable container scheme, with 30 million bottles. It’s one of few long-lasting reuse schemes in New Zealand – equivalents like glass milk bottles disappeared, after the advent of cheap plasticin the 1970s.

Chia Sisters doesn’t wash its own bottles, but it does use a refillable model – customers can refill their juice in glass bottles from kegs at certain stores.

Solid runs its own integrated reuse scheme, where customers can drop the bottles back at stores, at the business itself in Wellington, or via post. Each jar can be used up to 50 times – with its carbon emissions equal to a single use plastic container after the eight wash.

About 30 other businesses nationwide are attempting similar models – but they say ideally, rather than each business doing it alone, there would be a centralised system. This might include standardised jar and bottle sizes, meaning less logistics when it came to returning containers to where they came from.

Those issues will be considered by Ministry for the Environment research into about what a nationwide refillable system might look like – and whether it should be attached to the Container Return Scheme.

Reuse Aotearoa lead researcher Hannah Blumhardt said the two systems would work best in tandem – the return scheme would help get containers back – a precursor to reusing them.

While reuse worked best in local areas, even if all the bottles had to travel to Auckland to be washed it would still be more environmentally friendly than recycling, Blumhardt said.

In Titahi Bay, Nixon says customers really love returning their containers – some combining drop off at their house with a trip to the local cafe, or a walk with the dog. Solid offers a free toothpaste for each 12 jars returned, but Nixon said most people were motivated by a sense of community and wanting to do the right thing, rather than by a freebie.