SOLVING THE PLASTIC PROBLEM

PLASTIC WASTE IS HARMING ANIMALS AND OUR PLANET. CAN THE DAMAGE BE UNDONE?

- Jeff Young

PEOPLE WALKING THE STREETS OF DOWNtown Petaluma, California, started seeing something new on the sidewalks in summer. Alongside the usual trash cans and recycling containers were large purple bins with small openings the size and shape of a drinking cup.

Patrons of the 30 or so downtown restaurants, cafés and coffee shops participating also started getting their carry-out drinks in durable cups the same shade of purple. The color-coordinated cups and bins were part of the Petaluma Reusable Cup initiative. The first-of-its-kind experiment aims to scale up reusable cups and reduce single-use plastics that too often wind up as waste, clogging rivers, killing marine wildlife and risking human health.

"There are a lot of people anxious about our future and concerned about the amount of plastic that we're using as a society, and one of the cures for that anxiety is action," Patrick Carter told Newsweek. Carter is the assistant to the city manager for Petaluma, a city of about 60,000 people roughly an hour's drive north of San Francisco.

In the three months of the privately funded pilot project, organizers said 200,000 cups were put in bins to be collected, washed, sanitized and returned to businesses for another use.

"We have enough data now to know that this has been a successful experiment," Kate Daly, a managing partner at the investment firm Closed Loop Partners, told Newsweek. Daly leads the company's Center for the Circular Economy, which set up the Petaluma project with funding from the NextGen Consortium, a global group including Starbucks, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Pepsi and other companies working to reduce waste from food service packaging. Their funding made it easier for Carter and local businesses to try out the cost-free program.