Vytal Reusable Packaging as a Service

In Germany the consumption of take-away, convenience and delivery food & drinks is responsible for about 281 kilotons of single-use packaging waste for immediate consumption and is growing at double digit rates. Most of the time, To-Go food containers, snack boxes or coffee cups have a very short life-span of only 30 minutes after which they are tossed into trash (or litter parks, beaches & the ocean). This is not only a giant waste of economic resources as each single use costs between 15 and up to 0,60€ for a stable bowl/box with a lid. It is a horrendous waste of environmental resources (wood, water, crude oil, metals & energy) that are used to produce this packaging. Therefore, a single use packaging not weighing more than 30 grams can easily come with an ecological backpack of more than 8 kilograms when taking into account all the resources used in production (material intensities taken from Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy). Looking at GHG emissions, the picture is similarly bleak: Using CO2 emission factors and the detailed material mix of the single-use packaging waste analyzed by NABU (German Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union), the 281 thousand tons waste from To-Go consumption generated around 556 thousand tons of CO2 or the equivalent of 195k passenger cars per year (assuming an average distance travelled of 15,000km). With the expected rise of take-away, convenience and delivery food, the related emissions are expected to increase at double digit rates as waste volume is expected to increase and as we saw a shift to plastics relative to cardboard or other materials. While there is a growing awareness of the problem, especially in Germany, there is no scalable solution yet and the commonly used alternative of nature-based & ‘biodegradable’ materials like bagasse or PLA also require many resources for production & transport, and have to be incinerated or go to landfill after use as there is currently no way to compost them.