A Danish city's creative solution to plastic waste is paying people to return their coffee cups, and the numbers show it works brilliantly, reported the Good News Network.
The city of Aarhus introduced a simple program that lets people use sturdy plastic cups from local cafes and return them to special machines around town for a small payment. One year in, residents have reused more than 700,000 cups, earning over €514,000 in small rebates.
The idea came after a shocking discovery. "Through waste analysis, we discovered that 45% of waste in Aarhus came from takeaway packaging," Simon Smedegaard Rossau, project manager for circular packaging at Aarhus Municipality, told Euronews. "This finding was a turning point."
The program started with 45 cafes signing up to offer the cups. People who return their cups to one of the city's convenient deposit machines get €0.70 back, similar to how bottle deposits work in many European countries.
The results speak for themselves. During just one week-long city festival, people returned 100,000 cups, enough to fill 1,200 trash bins. The program has already saved 14 metric tons of plastic, with 88% of cups being returned and reused an average of 44 times each.
"We now see shifts in behavior. We see people going with bags full of cups, which means they recycle in bulk, like for cans and bottles," says Rossau.
City leaders see this as just the beginning.
"Aarhus must be greener and more sustainable, and Aarhus must be a city where we have the courage to test new solutions," Nicolaj Bang, counselor for technology and environment in Aarhus, said in a press release when the scheme was announced.
"We use enormous amounts of takeaway packaging in Denmark, and consumption is increasing. Therefore, it really matters if we can make it easier for both consumers and businesses to choose a more sustainable alternative to disposable packaging."
The program's success has sparked plans to expand into nearby suburbs and add other kinds of food packaging to the mix, per Good News Network.
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