97. Why we're getting reusable packaging wrong

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Hello, welcome to Talking Rubbish, a weekly podcast delving deep into the world of recycling and discussing the truth behind snappy headlines and one-sided stories. In this episode, we will discuss why we think companies are getting reusable packaging wrong. Are posters rubbish or not? And can you claim a deposit on a flattened can or bottle? I'm James Piper, author of the rubbish book, and I'm joined by Robbie Stanaforth, my far from rubbish friend. Good morning, Robbie. Hey James. How are you today? Yeah. Very good, very good, very good. Thank you. That's become a catchphrase, hasn't it? How are you today? You've never I don't think you Oh no, you have said bad once. You did say you're ill once. Ill, tired occasionally, but no, generally. Mostly positive. Mostly positive, yeah. This is good. That's what they'll put on my tombstone. Mostly positive. What are they gonna put on mine? Just talks rubbish. So much rubbish. Yeah. Oh, I would really like that. Hopefully we've got a lot of time to think about that yet. Yes, but now it is a matter of record. I'm glad it's been recorded. Just in case you never know, do you? Just in case something happens. I'm on my way to Longlead Safari Park after this, and I just think if I get mauled by a tiger, do we have tigers at Longlead or Lion or something? At least now, recorded is my wishes. Yeah, your last will and testament. Very good. We are getting so close to episode 100. We're on episode 97. We're only three away. About to bring the century up big stuff. Very, very exciting. Obviously, we have a bit of a celebration. There's a bit of complexity here in terms of calendars, which I just need to explain. We are celebrating episode 100 on the Thursday that it goes out, which I'm just loading up my calendar to make sure I get the dates right, is the 25th of June. And we're having a live event. So in our show notes, you can click, meet up with us for a drink, celebrate hitting 100. That's the 25th of June. But we have to record episode 100, right? And there's quite a few people who have said, Well, I can't make it to Bristol for your celebration. So we were thinking what we might do to record 100 is do our first ever properly live episode. You up for this, Ravi? I'm so nervous. It's going to be a technical challenge. That's all we're going to say at this point. It's going to require some very fast editing from me. It's going to be a bit of a nightmare. But we're going to try and do it. So the only downside to this is it's a day before episode 99 goes out. So you're all going to have to bear with us while we celebrate episode 100 while on episode 98. But on the 17th of June in the evening, we're thinking like 7 p.m., we're going to go live and we're going to record episode 100. And then on the 25th of June, so a week later, episode 100 will go out like a normal episode. But if you want to watch Robbie and I record, 17th of June is the date to get in the diary. So what we're going to do is in the show notes for this episode, I will put a link to that eventbrite. So there'll be two event brights. There'll be one, which is come and celebrate with a drink, which is 25th of June. And there'll be another, which is sit down with your dinner or a drink online and be part of our live episode. And we'll be asking for questions from you guys and getting all the influences together. So we'd really love it if you can join us for that. So again, for now, I'll just put an eventbrite because I'm not entirely sure how we're going to host it. It's probably going to be on YouTube. But um, let us know if you can join the live episode, and then nearer the time, we will send you a link to that recording. Trash tour. I debated the title of today's. I was sort of originally thinking we'll call it should we ban single-use packaging? This is another reusable packaging trash talk. I think we lot we haven't talked about reusable packaging in ages. We did the coffee cup thing sort of like 36, I think we were talking about reusable coffee cups. I mean, I think something like I can't even remember what episode it was, one of the very early episodes in the first 10, uh, we talked about how to make reusable packaging work. But I kind of changed from should we ban single-use packaging to why is everyone getting reusable packaging wrong? Which instantly puts me in this kind of aggressor category that I don't like. Well, I think it's a fair description of what you've been seeing, is just like, why is this not quite hitting the mark? I think it's fair. 100%, 100%. And there's lots that's going right, and we'll talk through it. I mean, basically, what's happened is a couple of weeks ago, I went to an expo in Paris, which was the Reuse Expo. So it was a conference for reusable packaging. And I sat through lots of talks and I sort of spent a lot of time thinking about it. And we, Robbie and I and a couple of others have have spent a lot of time thinking about how to make reusable packaging work. And I was at this reuse economy expo thinking, I'm just thinking differently to everyone else, and I can't work out if that's good or not. And I thought, you know what? I'll just put it out on the podcast as an episode, and then we can all decide. People can shoot you down. Yeah, yeah, I'll get lots of emails, I'm sure. So I was at the Port de Versailles, just south of Paris, very nice, at the Reuse Economy Expo. And I think it was a bit bigger than when I went, uh, which was back in 2024. It was actually in a slightly different venue, but from the pictures that I've seen of the event, it things are headed in the right direction, I think. You know, there's definitely lots more stands and exhibits. It was a very niche little sort of thing in a park in Paris, basically, uh, when I went just two years ago. In a well, outdoors, in a park. Yeah, it was well, no, there was a sort of uh one of those um it was a very small exhibit. It was right. Yeah, it wasn't like a show hall at a national exhibition centre or anything. It was a very small sort of hangar, I suppose. Okay. What do you call those things? Hangers. Yeah, okay, I understand. Uh I mean, I as I was walking in, I bumped into a few um people from the world of reuse. I mean, it was the who's who of reusable packaging. I bumped into uh Laura from Accardo and then Helen and Calf from Go Unpackage, just literally walking down the road to find some breakfast. And you just thought, oh, okay, we're all here. This is great. We've got a really nice UK representation here. I think it was Helen said to me, apparently Macron's coming today. And I thought, what Macron, the president of France, is coming to a reuse packaging expo. That's amazing. Okay, wow. It must be huge. And I walked in expecting, because I'd been told this, I walked in expecting this massive venue, thousands of stands. It was pretty small. Um, my understanding is over the course of a couple of days, they had like 4,000 visitors. Just to put that in perspective, it's about a quarter of the size of RWM, which is the UK kind of waste management conference that we hold in Birmingham. And I can't imagine Keir Starmer, or whoever's prime minister at the time RWM happens in September. I can't imagine Keir Starmer rocking up to RWM. I think the best we ever had was Eric Pickles back in the early 2010s, who got an absolute I mean, do you remember Eric Pickles going to RWM? He got so told off because he was trying to brick was he trying to do weekly general bin collections and everyone was really angry that he wasn't increasing recycling and and so I walked in to what was a relatively small venue in my mind, and they'd roped off half of it, and that's it's exactly what happened for the first half hour of the show. Macron came in, he spoke to a few of the stands for half an hour, he left, and then they took the ropes down and we could all start the conference. And it completely I mean it derailed the conference program because they were like, oh god, we were meant to start half an hour ago. But other than that, it was excellent. Okay, so he had a sort of like semi-private kind of viewing and stuff before it all kicked off. Yeah, he just I mean, yes, there were lots of people obviously around the stands and lots of media, so I don't think anything he does is private. But Well, okay, yeah, sure. But I guess what it made me think is what a showing for reuse pack reusable packaging. I mean, France is taking it so seriously, you have the president of the country coming to an event to chat to a couple of stands about their reusable cups. That is a world apart from where the UK is. Yeah, that's exactly right. I just when you talk us through it, I just can't imagine the Prime Minister turning up even at a waste management and recycling conference, which is a much bigger industry than uh any of the reuse economy we have over here. But the reason I suppose he turned up is because I think it's fair to say that the French are absolute global leading lights in reuse and certainly in reuse policy. Did you feel that when you were over there? Sort of. Ooh, okay. We'll come back to it. Why don't you give us a summary on the policy and then I'll give you my views on what I experienced. So back in 2010, uh, France introduced law anti-gaspillage pour une economie circulaire. Very good French, which you will obviously know is anti-waste for a circular economy law, 2020. And in this, they cited the complete phase out of single-use packaging by 2040, 20 years from when they set the law into stone. But it's a pretty big and bold ambition to say that you're not going to have any single-use packaging. However, the more tangible things that we've seen in the sort of shorter term are rules around dine-in catering. This is the one that often gets mentioned. So all restaurants and fast food chains with more than 20 seats have to serve food and beverages in reusable tableware for on-site customers and cups. So you can't have the classic McDonald's happy meal in a cardboard box with a burger clamshell if you're dining in. They have to have reusable tableware. Also, the plastic packaging around the vast majority of fruit and veg is banned. So that kind of promotes the loose bulk bins and reusable crates, etc. There's an eco-modulation on their extended producer responsibility, EPR fees, which basically rewards these reusable formats. Finally, also CITIO, who is their scheme administrator or producer responsibility organization, they're legally mandated to allocate 5% of all collected EPR revenue to reusable packaging. So they're not just using the fees on promoting recycling of single-use packaging. They're actually sending it across to be used and to scale up reusables. Okay, so on this podcast, we like to get into topical issues and give our opinions, right? And I think, like DRS, I have quite strong views on reusable packaging. Okay, and I'm really hoping that influencers don't mind me sharing how I feel, how you feel, Robbie. If you disagree with anything, get in contact. That's what this is all about. Okay. Now I don't think anything we're going to say today is controversial. It's not like DRS. I'm really willing to hear other opinions, and particularly there'll be companies who produce reusable packaging, I'm sure, who will have quite strong views about this. So just to set this up, there was a stat at the start of the day that I thought was really good, which is well not good, but a good way to start this, which is if you look at bottles in the EU, in 1999, 35% of them were refillable. Really? That's pretty good. Yeah. That dropped to 24% in 2009. Uh 17% in 2019, and is 14% today. Oh no. Okay, that's pretty instructive. Yeah, and you had a refill conference. So of course they put a positive spin on that and said, what an opportunity. We can grow the market share back up again. We're gonna party like it's 1999, guys. Exactly. But I think it is fair to say that despite all the sustainability talk, you know, worldwide, refillable packaging has gone backwards for 25 years. And we are now trying to reverse that trend. Let me come back to your comment, Robbie, about did I experience in France the political, you know, because there is this huge political will to have refillable packaging. Macron turning up to an event with four, you know, 4,000 attendees over a couple of days is to me incredible and should absolutely be celebrated and shows the political will that France has. But I decided to make a weekend of this trip to Paris. I don't like doing international short-term trips. So I thought actually, Ellie and our son, we can go and make a weekend of Paris. And we decided to do that. But that meant we got lots of time to experience this kind of refillable concept, this refillable packaging. So very, very last minute, we decided to spend a day in Disneyland. We decided that you know our very small child probably would get quite bored by Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, but the colours and music of Disneyland. So we thought let's just go and do a day. So it was for your son, was it, James? Of course. I'd have a lovely day. Everyone believes that. Everyone believes that. Lovely day. And um whilst I was pretty impressed actually with the refill stations. You bring a bottle in, there's a lot of refill points, a lot of water fountains. That was really good. The restaurants that we had lunch in, everything was in single use. Paper cups, all the coffee was in paper cups while we're dining in. Oh, so they've got around it somehow. Well, I couldn't understand. I think they're all breaking the law. Look, I don't want Mickey Mouse's lawyers on the phone. So if I'm wrong, let me know why I'm wrong. But I can't understand why Disney would be exempt. Unless there's maybe there's some closed environment exemptions, but you would think it would go the other way. And if you had a closed environment, you'd have to use refillable more than an open environment. Disneyland Paris closes due to podcasts. My hotel room while I was staying there, single-use paper cups for both water and coffee. I hate this in hotels. I've always hated that. So unnecessary. As I like to do in France, I headed to a McDonald's the night before to get a drink because I like to see the refillable packaging in McDonald's. So I thought I'll go and get a drink and see it. I said I was dining in and they served me the drink in a single-use cup. Um really? And in McDonald's, yeah, and in McDonald's, everything was in refill, but for whatever reason, they served it to me in a single-use cup. But everyone else was in refill. But it's absolute chaos. It's it's just unbelievable. And McDonald's, if anyone's seen the founder, you will know that McDonald's prides itself on kind of just quick service, really quick service, really simple stuff. And just as an example, the lids, I think, in the UK, they sort of tell you what drinks in it, don't they? You can push down the diet zero, whatever it is. It's like a hole type thing, isn't it? Yeah. The second you've got refillable packaging, you don't have a lid that tells you what's in the drink. So it was like watching one of those um, you know, where's the ball games? The cups, the cups and balls. The cup would go on a tray, and then someone else would come up and move that cup to a different tray, and then someone else would come up and move that cup to a different tray and swap it with another cup. And you're just watching them going, I don't know how anyone is getting the right order here. Like every single cup has moved from one tray to another. So while it is all very impressive that McDonald's have this refillable packaging, it genuinely felt like chaos because they're complying with the law, but they haven't spent time going, how do we make it as efficient as our single-use packaging? How do we make it as clever? Um, that hasn't quite cut through. Then you go to like the refill stations next to the bins, and it's just a pile of refillable packaging. No organization, no put your tray here, your cup here. It's just piled up. It's not great. Let's be honest. It's a matter of public record. I think that the McDonald's are not the biggest fan of refill. There is a sceptical part of me that thinks it might be in their interest to make it look quite chaotic, so that the French people go, we actually don't like this. I don't like getting the wrong burger, the wrong drink, and fries instead of a salad or whatever it is. I think they have sort of wedged in a requirement rather than designing it from the ground up, which is what you would do if it was your decision to do it. Those are just some examples where I didn't feel like, even though I felt the political will was there, I didn't feel like it that was cutting through. And there is another example of this because actually at the event uh someone spoke called Boris Palmer, who's the Lord Mayor of Tubingen in Germany. He pioneered a citywide tax on single-use items. So he charged 20 cents on cutlery and 50 cents on food and beverage packaging. This was to promote reuse. McDonald's fought it and took him to court and said, we're not paying this tax. In 2021, the tax was passed. In 2022, there was a challenge by McDonald's. In 2023, the state court upheld McDonald's challenge. Really? But then in also in 2023, the federal court overturned the state decision. And then that went to the Supreme Court who agreed that the tax was lawful. So in Tubingan and now five other cities, there is a tax on single-use packaging. And that is an expensive tax, 50 cents on food and beverage packaging. And he was very inspiring, Boris, who implemented this tax. You know, he's fought McDonald's, he's won. He's a bit of a hero in the reuse for sure. And he said, and it got lots of claps, he said, Why can I go to McDonald's in France and see reusable packaging? But I can't have that in Germany. And it got lots of claps because it's true. They've shown they can do it. They just don't want to do it. So at some point you have to say, Well, politics has to step in here and fix this. All these examples I've given are not the only ones. I decided to get breakfast at the event and they had a a Paul. You know, the cafe Paul. Oh, yes. It's quite big in France. They had one of these cafes at the kind of expo. So I dine in. I say, I'd like a coffee. I haven't brought my reusable cup to this weekend because I think, well, no one's going to give me a single use cup. I only ever dine in. And in pool, they served me in a takeaway coffee cup. Oh. And I counted the seats, they had 30 seats. They meet the 20-seat requirement in the law. Why are they not complying with the law? And why are they particularly not complying with the law? That's an event about reusable packaging. That's the one time I'd probably when Macron's coming. That's the one time I'd probably make sure I did have my reusable cups to hand. But hey, there we are. Don't get told off by Macron. So I walked in, very depressed. You know, I hadn't experienced a huge amount of reusable packaging in France, even though I should have done the whole time. And in my opinion, all these people are breaching the rules and regs, and I think there is just a distinct lack of enforcement. And then you get into the event, and all day, the whole event, I just heard variations on the same theme. High technology, high deposit solutions, return machines, QR codes, chips, just reusable packaging has to be tech heavy. You have to track every cup. If you don't, people will steal cups. You just hear that again and again and again and again. And here's my controversial pitch. I do not agree that this is the future of reuse. I think what happens is you if you put together a solution that makes your packaging significantly more expensive and way more onerous than single use because people need an app and they need to pay a deposit. And now as a consumer, I'm giving you extra money to buy my product, companies will fight it. Companies like McDonald's do not want to charge consumers more than they have to. So that's why a 50 cent tax is worth fighting. Now, if you've got a 50 cent deposit, if that's what's baked into your reusable packaging solution, brands will not take part. They will refuse to be in a high-tech, high-complex solution because they don't want to lose 10, 20, 30% of their customer base who haven't downloaded the app, who haven't got the money to pay a deposit. Ultimately, them fighting reuse is not good. I I I make the argument that brands are the gatekeeper, not the consumer when it comes to reuse. Yeah, I think ultimately when you see lots of these surveys going around of the average person, they're willing to do a bit more, willing to accept reusable solutions and stuff. The problem is that solution needs to be quite easy, i.e., as easy as buying single use. If there's no difference or no real big discernible difference, then people are willing to do it. And I think it really is, as you say, the brands, and I agree with you, who need to step forward and work out how to make it easy. Not too dissimilarly to McDonald's needing to over time improve the way that they sort of vend their products so that reusable can actually work and not be a mess and stacked up in a corner and no one knows what drink they've got. They've really got to dive in to work it all out because they're probably in the best position to understand what is actually going to work, provided they want the right outcome. They want it to work. And let me give you an example from the show. So I'm at a reuse conference. Let's ignore Paul, which was a disaster. The actual dine-in catering had reusable cups. Okay, so I said and I think it was just for that event, by the way. But it's just China cups, though. I mean, do you use China cups or oh no, plastic? No, plastic. Um one of these tech companies who provided cups. Okay. No signage, nothing. I had no idea what to do with this cup. I don't speak French. So I get given a grey cup, you know, thick plastic. It's got a QR code on it, and that's all it's got on the cup. I scan the QR code, nothing happens. I just get taken to the website of the tech company. Turns out I'd paid a deposit. I didn't realise this till the end of the day. When I was buying Coffee, I was paying a two euro deposit. No one had told me this. Two euro? I think so. Yeah. No one had told me this. No one had mentioned it. It wasn't written on the cup. And here's the kicker. To get my deposit back, I had to show my receipt. And you never take a receipt. So I couldn't get my deposit back. And I didn't even know how to get my deposit back. I ended up just leaving it on the side of the cafe and just accepting that I'd donated to the high-tech solution. But here's me, a very engaged, you know, target market, top 10%, cares about reusable packaging, wants it to work. And I, for love nor money, literally money, could not get this deposit back because I hadn't taken a receipt. Like it doesn't matter all this effort you put into making it simple, just if you haven't got the barista telling you what to do or the system set up so that it doesn't need a receipt, it's an absolute disaster. So the talks were all variants on this theme. Here's the deposit level, here's our return rate, discuss. And so Reposit reported that MS have a return rate in the UK of 64 to 76%, which I actually think is quite low. That's for their hand wash and um in MS they have this reposit area, which is personal care. And you download NAP, you pay a £2 deposit when you buy it, when you bring back the bottle, you get your two pound back. So that's a 64 to 76% deposit. I suspect what's happening there is people are keeping the metal containers and then refilling them. And that's what's happening there rather than getting a high return rate. Yeah, whereas when we look at like closed loop environments, so Borough reported a 91% return rate in football stadiums. And that I mean it was genuinely impressive. They were talking about fast scanning. So they had this graph that showed when the cups were coming back. And in one minute, or in a couple of minutes, actually, I think it was, they got 13,312 cups back. And that's because people leave the event and just go chuckle the cups in the machine. But that is amazing they can get that kind of return that fast because that's a lot of processing power to um to return that money. That's not QR codes being scanned one at a time, sure. No, you can actually put stacks in. They were showing videos of people putting stacks of cups through the machine and it reading all of the QR codes. It was very, very impressive. Aarhus, which is a city in Denmark, in 2024, they did a big project around reusable packaging. They do deposits, they have machines to take the deposit back, they get an 88% return rate. Now, there were a couple of interesting things there because they said, well, in the first couple of days that they launched, they got a 23% return rate. It just goes to show that over time your return rate gets a lot better, and that's really important. They have had 1.8 million returns over two years, but only 20% of the cafes and shops they're in have default reuse. So only 20% of them don't have a single use option. 80% of them have single use and reuse. And experience tells us you can't have the option. So if we look at Borrow Cut, which is the one in Scotland that we talked about in episode 36, they had a 3.3% uptake because they had a single use or reusable option. You had to make a decision which one you used. But it has to be default for it to work. Yeah. People just think it's a bit too much hassle. I'll just go with what I know and play it safe with a single use cut, presumably. Yeah. So a summary of that is relatively high deposits, you get about 88 to 91% return rate. And that's good. That's really good. Yeah, I think that's good. So then there was a talk from a company called N Enview, I think they're called ENVIU. Now they have introduced reusable packaging in Pathay Cinemas in the Netherlands. So this is 32 cinemas, and they replaced cups, basically, hot cups and cold cups, with reusable packaging with no deposit. Now a cinema's easy. I've been obsessed with cinemas for a long time because I think a cinema is perfect for reusable packaging because most people just leave their packaging in the cinema. So you could go around collecting it up and then wash it out. No one takes it home. No, very rarely. Sometimes you leave with a little bit of popcorn in the bottom, but uh often I finish my popcorn before the first 10 minutes of the film, if I'm honest. Exactly. Now they were achieving an 85% return rate. They said they had a lower return rate in the summer because people were taking the cups for camping trips. But the lowest they experienced was 73%. This is the crux of my argument. Why do we have high-tech, expensive machines with huge embodied carbon in them that need repairing, that need emptying, that need transport, that need finances to run. I mean, some of these machines, we were talking to people who were charging £400 a month to run a machine, and you're just thinking, it's expensive. You know, this is really expensive. You want a few machines in your office, this is going to be expensive. Not to mention the fact that you're adding a chip or QR codes to cups, which automatically makes them, I mean, just adding the chip or QR code is significantly more expensive than single use. So just as a starting point, if you ignore the cup, if you just provide the chip, you're more expensive than a single use cup. So you need to achieve high return rates. But the cinema has shown us that you can achieve a similar return rate, 85% compared to let's say 91%, with no tech, no vending machines, no embodied carbon, cheaper packaging. And personally, I would rather have an 85% return rate on a techless cup that was quite close in price to the single-use packaging, than a 91% return rate on a super high-tech, I'm not losing any, and customers are owed loads of money product. Yeah, I'm just trying to think about like the old and influencers will know about the milk round and the classic refillable milk bottle. You put them out at night. And that's just done on trust, isn't it? Really? You could just steal all those milk bottles, but what are you going to do with them? Eventually you're like, I just simply don't need that many glass milk bottles to whatever you might be doing, store something or smashing them up for aggregate in your garden, or it's just actually when you really think it through, it's just not that valuable stuff. And in other applications, like the China Cup has existed for thousands of years. People don't swipe those and walk off with them. So why would you think uh just because we've got used to single use, people would walk off with reusable other types of cups and uh containers, etc. So I don't know, there is something about a little bit more faith in humanity needing to be required. Absolutely. And to be fair to people building the systems, I completely understand the fear of everyone's gonna seal all my packaging and it's gonna be really expensive. That fear that if you don't track assets, cups disappear, if you don't create accountability, return rates collapse, I get that. But I don't believe it. I genuinely don't believe it. And the trouble with these things, there's two other problems that come from making a high-tech solution. One is that brands see it as a profit center. As I said in my DRS conversation a few episodes ago, unclaimed deposits could fund the system. You will end up in a similar situation where it is better because you've got a two euro deposit, it is better for a customer not to bring back their cup. You've got no incentive to make it simple, to make it work, to make the return rate high. It could become a profit center. There was a really good case study of this around Lisbon, because Lisbon introduced a ban on single-use plastic cups, but they did not introduce any performance requirements. So they didn't say we're going to ban single-use cups, and when you move to reusables, you need to get a 90% return rate. They let the companies decide the return rate. So what happened? Single use cups were replaced with reusable cups, but the cups were used as single use. You know, similar to what happened with the carrier bag charge, you just end up buying bags for life. And some and people do, and we know that from the averages. And so now Lisbon is trying to introduce return rate requirements, but it's similar to this McDonald's thing. It's like, yeah, we'll introduce it because we have to, but we're not going to spend a huge amount of time thinking how do we get to a 95-99% return rate. Also, if it's really expensive, you need legislation to come in. So if you've made it so that reusable packaging is kind of way more expensive than single use, the running costs are crazy, the um embodied carbon is huge, ultimately brands won't want to do it. So you've got to have legislation that pushes brands to do it. That is what I heard time and time again. Why aren't countries mandating reusable packaging? Now I am the biggest advocate of that. I think the UK should 100% ban single use packaging on dyne-in, 100% behind that. I think there are lots of rules that should come in from a legislative perspective. But I'm also aware that we're in a cost of living crisis where the government is scared to do anything that adds inflationary pressure. Knowing that's our situation, we should be starting to see if we can make reuse work at a price competitive with single use. Because then brands will do it because they're like, oh, actually, I look a lot better. My marketing can be a lot better. And it's costing me about the same as single use. Once you've proven that works, you can then start introducing legislation and you can take it from an 85% return rate to a 91% return rate by slowly adding in tech. But I don't think you need to do it at this point when you're trying to prove the business model. And I think constantly pressuring the government to put in legislation is something that I don't think is going to happen anytime soon. The UK government have had some work streams open on reuse over the last year or two, but it's only really likely to culminate in a call for evidence. And whenever there's a call for evidence, that means there's no clear policy instruction. We're not consulting on bringing something new in because we have a good idea of how to do it. It's a sort of, please can you give us some ideas and throw them into the pot? We'll give them some due consideration and then maybe in a year or two or three's time we'll get around to thinking about what kind of rules we might want to bring in. In terms of the legislative uh landscape in the UK, it doesn't look like we're gonna get anything very soon. And I can't see much changing, as you say, with the the background around inflation and things. It's gonna be very difficult to see the government pushing something through at a fast pace on reuse. I've said it before and I'll say it again. The best reuse system is the one consumers don't notice. I'm feel like I'm pushing against the reuse industry at the moment, in that I feel it has to be the default. There should never be a single use option. Customers should just walk into a shop, get given a coffee and a reusable packaging, and there should just be bins everywhere for them to put that in and then it can be collected and washed. It doesn't need to be high-tech. We can design it like our single use requirements, and I believe still get a high return rate. I don't think there should be deposits, tech. I think you just replace paper cups with something stronger, you replace salad bowls with stronger, etc., etc. It should be food packaging as well. As I said, brands are the gatekeepers, not consumers. Brands need to come on the journey. Even the most impressive examples like Aarhus, which is seen as a really good example of turning a city into a reused city. I don't think they've got brands signed up to that. They've got independence because the brands don't want to charge deposits to customers. And so we have to recognise that and we have to design the system around it. You need bold bins everywhere to collect back the reusable packaging. It has to be so clear what people need to do. One of the key things to reduce the carbon and to get the life cycle right, and we'll come on to the life cycle of reusables on another day. You need to wash and redistribute locally. If we think about all the things in our lives, you know, you go to the pub, you get given a pint glass, you give it back. Why? Some people don't, right? Imagine if pubs started going, oh, we're worried because we've lost a few glasses, so actually we're going to switch to paper. There would be uproar. But yet we do it every day when people buy a coffee. Every day. Absolutely bizarre. So to wrap up this trash talk, every extra layer of complexity is making it harder for consumers, but also harder for brands to take part. And it's easier for businesses to argue against it. And it's harder for them to argue against like taxes on single use, which I'm a big advocate for, or you know, driving reusables in things like dying in. It's just obvious to me. And at the moment, single use is frictionless, it's cheap, it's convenient, it's everywhere. And I just feel at the moment that the industry is looking a little bit too almost backwards, but almost forwards too much too. It's sort of trying to future-proof something that might not be where we end up. Maybe the goal shouldn't be to build a perfect high-tech reusable system. Maybe it's just to make reuse feel completely normal. You drink from a cup, you put it in a bin, it gets washed, and it comes back. Additions and corrections. Yeah, so I've got an addition to our rubbish news on episode 92. Do you remember someone registered a cow called Beau Vine? Yes. Um, for a waste carrier's license. So it and that's happened a few times. We talked in the episode about um various animals being registered over the years. Well, government have recently announced that they're increasing their background checks for like proving identity and a criminal record, etc., and that there will be a permitting regime rather than just this registration process. So I remember, James, you mentioned it's annoying that you can just like put your details in, name, address, etc., and suddenly you've got this waste carrier's number that proves you're a legitimate operator, but you haven't actually gone through any hoops whatsoever. So it's good news, this government announcement, and um, so it's an addition to what we previously said, because now they're going to be moving to an actual permitting regime instead of a registration process. Whether that actually means they can enforce the law against these sort of operators on the margins, so we say, in the waste industry, kind of remains to be seen. But I think it's good progress. My addition is following episode 94, where we talked about obsolete tech, we had Danny comment on YouTube about Hive, who in 2025 discontinued all their security tech. I guess first of all, I just want to thank Danny for being a longtime supporter of the podcast. Uh, they found us on YouTube quite a while back and then proceeded to comment on every single YouTube video to help us grow. So I really, really appreciated that. Thank you so much, Danny. The irony of this Hive thing is that they are owned by British Gas's parent company, which is Centrica. And they said they were taking the decision to make their products obsolete so that they could focus on bringing the UK closer to achieving net zero. Let's just forget that embodied carbon, shall we? Can you believe that? What a press release. Uh, we're making all this tech useless because uh we want to focus on net zero. Did not see that turn coming. I can't believe that got signed off by a sustainability team. And they refused to give refunds. The refunds were only available if the item was faulty, not just because they made it useless. And after they announced they were discontinuing, you could still buy the products on John Lewis and Curry's. That feels so irresponsible to me. I really think it should be like a recall. Like, if you've decided your tech is not going to work anymore, it should be illegal for you to continue to sell it, don't you think? Yeah, it's crazy. Like you I would be so fuming if I had bought one of these things and then immediately like, oh, it's like not going to work soon. This is security products. This is cameras, this is locks, this is all sorts of things. And so you've now got to replace them. Like, seriously, replace it's not like you go, oh, it's a Kindle, oh, I just won't buy another Kindle, I've got an iPad. Like, this is your secure your own security. So you're definitely going to have to replace it. So Hive, you join Talking Rubbishes Naughty List. We'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsor, EcoSurety, who are on a mission to rid the world of unnecessary packaging. They help brands navigate the tricky world of extended producer responsibility, but that is not all. They also collaborate on some incredible recycling projects and consumer awareness campaigns for those tough to recycle materials. If you're an organisation looking to make smarter packaging choices, check them out at ecosurety.com. And the best thing you can do to help our podcast to grow is to tell your friends and family about it, but also to leave us a review. And if you leave us a review, you can be Robbie's review of the week. Now, Robbie, before you start, sometimes I like to interject here just to prep you a little bit and make sure you're okay. We're going from France to the Netherlands here. Confusingly, though, their username is Talk to France. So this is a review in the Netherlands from someone whose username is Talk to France. And I'm gonna be completely honest, Robbie. I have a few Dutch friends and I've always found them quite direct. Ah. And so I saw a review coming from the Netherlands and I thought, this is gonna be direct. So I'm just mentally preparing you for the review you're about to read out. Oh gosh. Okay, so this is an Apple four-star review. It's that star loss that I knew. I thought, mmm, there's gonna be a comment here. And I suspect I know what has caused us to lose that star. Uh and they say the headline is goodbye skip button. So that sort of works pretty well, I would say. That's nice so far. Yeah, good so far. This podcast is a genuine enrichment of the podcast genre. I actually learn stuff without having to resist sleep or the urge to hit the skip button. Genuinely pleasant stuff for anyone with even the slightest interest in their environment. Now, here's one criticism. Oh no. Can the frequently laughing presenter, I'm not naming names, try not to sound like someone choking on a chestnut? Is choking on a chestnut a common phrase? I've never heard that before, but it's pretty good. Is that what it sounds like? Keep laughing, but keep the mental well-being of your audience in mind. Right. I need to develop a new laugh, clearly. That's what we've said before, it might be me. I don't know. We need to have a check on the chest now. I don't know what it sounds like. I'm glad they didn't name names. Yes, it's although it would be helpful. We're not sure. It's open to interpretation. Look, it's a great review. The first half's excellent. Second half's great. It's so hard for us because so many people say they love your laugh and that it's good for their well-being. And then occasionally you get someone saying it's bad for my well-being. But that person has said they don't touch the skip button, and you just think, surely you do a bit. Like that's the bit where you're always laughing. Skip. Yeah. Give you a little five seconds fast forward for the chestnut. I enjoy it. It's great. Now, speaking of reviews, we're actually getting pretty up to date on our reviews of the week. Oh, really? We're getting through them. I'm clearing the backlog. And I really, really don't want to sound desperate. But we were we do need some more reviews to achieve to fill create a new backlog of reviews of the week. So remember, you don't have to just review an Apple. You can email me, you can WhatsApp me, you can put it on Spotify. I see all of them, but it'd be great to get a few more reviews so that I'm a bit ahead because it's getting a bit nervy now. I'm sort of like getting to the week going, I hope someone leaves a review, otherwise, we're not going to have a Robbie's review of the week. I've got no issue with sounding desperate, it's my favourite part of the podcast. Please write in with a review. However, you can. WhatsApp us, email us, leave one on one of the podcast platforms. Great work. Thanks, Robbie. And you can follow us on social media at rubbishpodcast. You can email talkingrubbishpodcast at gmail.com or you can WhatsApp us. Also join our Discord. It's the easiest way to engage with us and listeners of the show. And the link to all of those things is in the show notes. Rubbish or not. I spotted this rubbish or not on Reddit from uh someone called I Love Blur. The band, presumably. I'm assuming so. And also, presumably, this rubbish or not is linked to their love of blur because they were asking whether you could recycle posters. And I can only imagine that it is just posters of blur. Posters of Oasis, maybe. They're thinking I love blur, so I've got to get rid of the Oasis ones. I've I've ri after 20 years late, 30 years late, maybe, I've finally decided which is my favourite band. I've got to get rid of these Oasis posters. You're absolutely right. What do you think, Robbie? Posters, rubbish or not? I think if it's predominantly paper, then yes. You know, plain or slightly glossy paper are fine for most paper mills. But obviously, if they're framed or mounted or laminated or whatever, then you're gonna need to either they are rubbish if they're laminated, or you're gonna To need to dismantle them in some way, shape, or form, take the frame from it, etc., uh, before recycling it. But definitely they can go in, just like we mentioned with newspapers and pamphlets, they're a very similar grade of paper, and they can be folded up and put into your paper bin with your normal household recycling collection. You just made me think because we actually had a comment on Discord from Lottie Link that I was saving for another day about laminated paper, because uh they went to a nursery or a gathering, um, and people were making laminated cards. And someone said, Do you not feel bad about the eco stuff when we laminate all these things, particularly for kids? And the response was if they didn't laminate, they would have to reprint things all the time. And so it was better to laminate once and keep it going a few times and then make it unrecyclable. That was better than reprinting every time someone needed it. Yeah, if it's been used many, many times, it's a reusable piece of paper, you could say, couldn't you? We might have to do the calculations on how many times you would have to reuse it. But I'm it's not going to be much, is it? It's just a thin bit of plastic. I'm gonna go with like three or four times, I reckon you have to use something laminated before it's better than the reprinted version. I'll leave you to do those cults. There's no maths behind that. That's just my gut feel. But if I think about like so I'm I'm comparing like reusable cups to single-use cups. You know, if you take a single-use paper cup, it can have a varying degree, but if you had a very thin, reusable cup, you could do it in two to three uses. You could be better than single use. Anyway, back to posters. It feels like the perfect opportunity for the scrunch test to me. I guess that would work on posters, wouldn't it? Yeah, it would, yeah. If they're a bit too too much plastic or too plasticky and they bounce back, then definitely not recyclable. Don't put it in your paper bin. Exactly. So that's the scrunch test, scrunch it up. If it bounces back, unrecyclable. If it stays scrunched, put it in the paper bin. Rubbish news. My news this week is that Beyond Plastics stuck some trackers to Starbucks plastic cups in the US, and these cups are labelled widely recycled, and they found they did not get recycled. Now we discussed a similar situation with flexible plastic back in episode 13. People dropping trackers into flexible plastic bins to see where they go. This one was between January and March 2026, and they glued trackers into cups using gorilla glue. It was very specific in the uh in the reporting. Oh, dropping the branding. Nice. Yes, and then they put them in recycling bins. There were 53 polypropylene cups tracked, and that was across nine states in America. Of the 53, 36 actually were tracked because you lose some in the process. It stops tracking, batteries stop working, whatever it is. 16 went to landfill, nine to incinerators. Now, this is where I disagree with them because they they said, oh, none of them were recycled. But eight were sent to waste transfer stations, where we're not entirely sure where it's gonna end up, and three were sent to a MERF. You know, there's a chance those were recycled. Um, but yeah, the 16 that went to landfill and the nine to incinerators, probably not. But can we stop doing this? If I read another report, I'm getting a bit animated here. If I read another report about people shoving trackers into plastic, I'm gonna go mad. Because guess what happens if you put electronics in plastic? People go, oh, it's contaminated. Let's burn it, let's landfill it. It doesn't tell you anything. I'm not pretending. I mean, I don't know whether people spotted the trackers or not. And in America, we know loads get sent off for landfill. So I'm not saying these polypropylene cups are all getting recycled. What I am saying is if you put a heavier tracker than a plastic cup glued into a cup, it is way more likely to be read as contamination. The metal's going to get detected or someone's gonna manually remove it, and it all gets sent off for landfill insinuation. It doesn't tell you what happens to an empty cup. I'm getting a bit fed up with trying not to be really angry. I'm getting fed up with people doing this because it just doesn't tell you anything. And it's not a fair test, is what you're saying, because it actually impacts what might happen to it. Not even remotely a fair test. It's like me rapping, I don't know. I can't even think of an example. Let me think of a better example. Let me think of an example. It's like me gluing a tracker to a plastic cup. That's a really, really good example. I don't know. It really winds me up. And the widely I mean, they were criticizing the widely recycled message, right, that's on the cup that Starbucks are promoting. But just to be clear, that message is provided by how to recycle, who are basically like OPRL in the UK. And what they've done is said, if you had a monomaterial polypropylene cup, it could be recycled, so you're allowed to put on it the message of basically please recycle this. It's not saying this is going to get recycled, it's telling the consumer what to do. And I have just never understood why NGOs and organizations and all these charitable, you know, amazing donation-led organizations are like, oh, we'd rather see a world where we put people off recycling, actually. What is the point? Why would you put out a report like that? I mean, there's an element of I'm sending this to Starbucks privately to say Starbucks, what you think is happening is not happening. Can you up your game? There is no point other than getting additional funding by being anti-plastic in telling people not to recycle. All you're doing is harming the planet. So why do companies and NGOs and organizations that like to say they are pro-planet and want everything to be good and don't want anything to go to waste, why are they putting out stories that will just make people feel like recycling is pointless? And I mean the answer is funding. We're not funded, Robbie. Not properly. And so we get to say what we actually feel, which is quite nice. But um, but thank you to our sponsor, EcoSurety, and we are very grateful. But you and me, just to be clear, do this completely voluntarily because we believe it's the right thing to do. And so I am always going to promote recycling. And unfortunately, I will always get angry at organizations that try and put people off it. So my news this week is on a positive front. It's actually some very simple, simpler recycling news. Um, it's about these mandatory collections that are bringing an uplift elsewhere in what you can recycle. So regular influencers will know that there have been significant changes in England over the past few months, including food waste collections being introduced, widespread, people now starting to get used to recycling their food. But this story comes from improving recycling services in Lincolnshire, which is in the eastern part of England. Northeast Lincolnshire have officially added three waste streams that were previously not collected there to their recyclable list of what goes in their grey bin. They use a grey bin over there for all of their recycling. And so now liquid carton board containers, like the sort of TetraPack type stuff, the clean toothpaste tubes, which we've talked about, um, those becoming a monomaterial uh in previous episodes, and also aluminium foil and trays. And they didn't mention the fact that they probably need to be the size of a tennis ball, which we have many times. So scrunch it up and try and make sure it's big enough to get through the recycling process. But it was great to see some good news from the eastern part of the UK that actually there are things that previously people generated as waste would have been in our rubbish category, and now they're in the or not officially. So great to see. Well, I should say actually, Rich was telling me it was his son who was very excited about DRS coming in. He was at pains to say my son disagrees with your views on DRS. Okay. His son's thinking cashola. Exactly. His son started thinking, all this litter picking I do, I'm gonna be rich. Not rich, the question. Not my dad. Not my dad, like money rich. And unfortunately though, whenever he's doing his litter picking, he's litter picking up cans that have been flattened. And so Rich was thinking, is my son gonna actually get rich? Or or are we in a situation where flattened cans will not get their deposit back? Robbie thought, well, you might think this is a bit rich, but if they can't be recognised by the machine, you probably won't get the deposit back because the cut bar if the barcode can't be read, and so over-the-counter return points might give a bit more leeway, you know, because it's not a machine saying sort of computer says no, we reject it. Um so maybe take them to over-the-counter return points, you might have a bit more luck, but if they can't be read by this machine, you're gonna have a bit of a problem with getting that deposit back. And the reason for that is because the DRS regulations for deposit return schemes on beverage containers say that they're allowed to refuse um soiled, not empty, not recognizable uh containers. And that's in part three, regulation 10, it's all underneath circumstances in which a person is not entitled to a relevant amount for a returnable item. So it is in there in law, and I think it probably most likely will be enacted when it becomes operational. It's just simply because they're worried about fraud, you know, worried about people pretending to give back something that isn't an actual redeemable deposit. Speaking of literate DRS, one thing we haven't talked about that you do see in major cities that I think does need thinking through is people going through bins looking for cans and bottles. The second you've made cans and bottles valuable, people who want the deposit will go to some lengths to find bottles and cans. And so one way cities have curbed this is by putting like a little ridge on the side of the bin where you can donate your bottle and can and then someone else can claim the deposit. And that works quite well. But it'll be interesting when the UK introduces it, you know, this view that it reduces litter. I think we need to solve some of the human behaviours that some people have within city centres to kind of empty out bins looking for things, because actually that could increase litter. Residual rubbish. As always, this is something that has happened to us this week that has made us feel like an emoji. And I'm going to be frustrated today, but with my usual frustrations, it's a common theme, this one. It's something that's been mentioned already today. As you heard from my trash talk, I've been in Paris with varying degrees of environmental success. And as I mentioned, I made a weekend of it and we were staying near the Louvre, and I went to a bakery I have been to a number of times over the years, and they've always been quite popular. And this time they'd installed self-served machines. I got to the end of my order and the screen said, Do you want a receipt or do you want to save the planet? Wow. Okay. So I thought, yeah, I thought that's that's bold. Having said that, the save the planet button was really dull compared to the receipt one. So it was like, do you want a receipt? Receipt normal colours. And then, or do you want to save the planet? But like really dull and like not obvious that you could hit it. But of course, I hit the, you know, I don't want a receipt. I hit the save the planet button. Brilliant. Two receipts came out. One with my order number, one with the card receipts. I wonder how many receipts I would have got if I'd said I didn't want to save the pivot. I had 10 receipts. Oh, that's amazing. So you've got no idea what happened. Well, what happened is they betrayed me. I had no idea when we started this podcast, Robbie, that receipts would become a repeatable fixture. But it's amazing how many times I'm getting annoyed by receipts. Twice in this episode. Twice. Come on, everyone. Let's uh let's live up to our promises of no receipts. We don't need them. I'm not gonna return the croissant I just bought. It's not happening. I can remember my order number for three minutes before you give me the croissant. Like it doesn't, I don't need it. I feel like this episode has made me so angry, and now I'm gonna have to go and have like a very calming mint tea after this, I think. Yes, absolutely. A nice chamomile tea and a sit-down. Come on, Robbie, bring me back. What's your residual rubbish today? So mine is probably one of those like nerd faces with a beaming smile, because this is probably a geeky kind of thing, I have to be honest. I was at a holiday cottage last weekend in Wales, very nice it was too, and for the first time in a few years, I was presented with, or I found by the sink, the traditional cheap sponge brillopad combo. You know, the sort of to clean a pan or whatever, no dishwasher, which is mostly what I'm doing at home. It was an absolute nightmare to use this thing, you know, after a fryer. It's basically a single-use item. So there I was trying to clean this pan, uh, using the washing up liquid and stuff. And it was just totally shredded by the time I was finished with it. And the reason that I've forgotten how totally useless these products are is because for years I've been using at home this natural coconut scourer. Now, this thing is brilliant on Teflon. It doesn't like, it's not like a sort of metal um wire wool or anything like that. It's not as abrasive as that. And it's way more effective. I must have had the one I've got at the moment for a year, 18 months, and it still does the job every time of this Brillo pad, which honestly, it was good for nothing by the end of cleaning up after one fry-up for three people. While I'm not going to get into the rubbish or not of the coconut scourer, it says it's biodegradable. We'll save that for another day. I expose this as a product placement, although there's no brand involved. If you're still frustrated as I was on the weekend by how rubbish these sponge Brillo pads things are, just Google natural coconut scourer. They're absolutely amazing. You say save the rubbish or nut for another day, but we have done sponges and loofahs. Do you think this is a scourer different? It's a slightly different one. Yeah. God, we can really expand our rubbish or nuts if we're allowed to go into the subcategories of each of the absolutely, absolutely. We've got a hundred episodes in the bag soon. We to do another hundred, that's what we're going to be, those depths that we're going to be stooping to. This is good news. I'd I'll stop panicking about running out of rubbish or nuts. As always, thank you all for listening. Thank you for the reviews and engagement. We love getting the opportunity to do this podcast each week. Join our Discord, follow us on social media at rubbishpodcast. You can email talkingrubbishpodcast at gmail.com or you can WhatsApp us. And everything we've discussed today can be found in our link tree, and the details to all those things can be found in our show notes. There is nothing left for me to say other than see you next binding. Bye. Bye.