Jun 17, 2026 · 32 min · 9 segments
What can we learn from city-scale reuse pilots? In our latest Packaging Europe podcast, Victoria Hattersley spoke with Carolina Lobel, Senior Director at the Closed Lop Center for the Circular…
Carolina LaBelleGuest
Victoria HattersleyHostNo entities detected.
the huge challenges there are i think that the industry as a whole has found in scaling reuse and we've heard and talked a lot about this over the years um you mentioned consumer behavior as one is that the biggest challenge or are there other kind of sort of more broader infrastructural challenges that are preventing reuse from being scaled the way we'd all like it to be
For me, it's like one is will consumers embrace it? And what does it take? And this was the question that Petaluma was answering.
And I am very encouraged and happy by the response we got to what does it take to shift consumer behavior? and then the next question that's actually something we are digging in much deeper now and exploring and now as a follow-up from petaluma it's like can we make the can we make this financially viable for businesses and what does it take to build the infrastructure that will make it so easy for any business to say yes to reuse we'll make it a no-brainer but on the on the consumer piece Going into Petaluma, we were used to thinking that behavior change, it requires a learning curve and it takes years and it takes generations and you need to educate one generation now for them to have a different behavior decades from now.
in Petaluma, we saw that this doesn't have to be the case, that you can actually shift behavior in an entire community in weeks or even days.
Like the moment we swapped all the single-use cups by purple reusable cups and made it in a very visible way, made it very widespread across the community, we saw that people embraced this new reuse behavior pretty quickly.
And were there any findings from the project, any learnings that surprised you?
I did not expect that adoption would happen so quickly, that people would actually feel so much pride and would get so excited about the purple cup and about purple bins that I think I was surprised to see how much people cared about that piece of waste, like for single use cups to be something so central in the life of that entire community to the point that the mayor was talking about the program, the point that like high schoolers were competing on who would return more cups, that people were dressed up as purple cups and purple bins for Halloween in that town.
Solving a problem that it's just, just became a part of their routine and it's part of the day to day of that community.
And I, I think the other thing I, I, it was, yeah, I, I could probably say surprising was.
when we decided to make the full switch we weren't sure that people would follow up and actually return the cups right so we were we took on a big risk of putting reusable cups out there and for free no strings attached just like this moral responsibility of being doing what your neighbors are doing and doing this because it's the right thing to do for your community and it was It could have been, we could have lost a bunch of durable reusable cups, like heavy plastic cups, and that would have been an environmental disaster and a very tough way of learning that we had to explore other paths.
But it was not surprising, but very satisfying and very good to find out that we can default to reuse and break even environmentally.
The reusable cups were already better for the environment than single-use cups.
I guess sometimes you can't overestimate the power of civic pride, can you, in some cases?
the huge challenges there are i think that the industry as a whole has found in scaling reuse and we've heard and talked a lot about this over the years um you mentioned consumer behavior as one is that the biggest challenge or are there other kind of sort of more broader infrastructural challenges that are preventing reuse from being scaled the way we'd all like it to be
For me, it's like one is will consumers embrace it? And what does it take? And this was the question that Petaluma was answering.
And I am very encouraged and happy by the response we got to what does it take to shift consumer behavior? and then the next question that's actually something we are digging in much deeper now and exploring and now as a follow-up from petaluma it's like can we make the can we make this financially viable for businesses and what does it take to build the infrastructure that will make it so easy for any business to say yes to reuse we'll make it a no-brainer but on the on the consumer piece Going into Petaluma, we were used to thinking that behavior change, it requires a learning curve and it takes years and it takes generations and you need to educate one generation now for them to have a different behavior decades from now.
in Petaluma, we saw that this doesn't have to be the case, that you can actually shift behavior in an entire community in weeks or even days.
Like the moment we swapped all the single-use cups by purple reusable cups and made it in a very visible way, made it very widespread across the community, we saw that people embraced this new reuse behavior pretty quickly.
And were there any findings from the project, any learnings that surprised you?
I did not expect that adoption would happen so quickly, that people would actually feel so much pride and would get so excited about the purple cup and about purple bins that I think I was surprised to see how much people cared about that piece of waste, like for single use cups to be something so central in the life of that entire community to the point that the mayor was talking about the program, the point that like high schoolers were competing on who would return more cups, that people were dressed up as purple cups and purple bins for Halloween in that town.
Solving a problem that it's just, just became a part of their routine and it's part of the day to day of that community.
And I, I think the other thing I, I, it was, yeah, I, I could probably say surprising was.
when we decided to make the full switch we weren't sure that people would follow up and actually return the cups right so we were we took on a big risk of putting reusable cups out there and for free no strings attached just like this moral responsibility of being doing what your neighbors are doing and doing this because it's the right thing to do for your community and it was It could have been, we could have lost a bunch of durable reusable cups, like heavy plastic cups, and that would have been an environmental disaster and a very tough way of learning that we had to explore other paths.
But it was not surprising, but very satisfying and very good to find out that we can default to reuse and break even environmentally.
The reusable cups were already better for the environment than single-use cups.
I guess sometimes you can't overestimate the power of civic pride, can you, in some cases?
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