Takeaway coffees are still often consumed in single-use cardboard cups. This leads to litter and overflowing rubbish bins on the streets. Moreover, despite their seemingly sustainable nature, many of these cups are not recycled but burnt during waste disposal. Currently, 70% of marine waste consists of single-use plastics, with disposable cups and meal containers among the top 10. The rising trend in takeaways along with rising environmental awareness results in a high demand for sustainable alternatives to disposable packaging.
With the project Quppa, CORE cv is working on a solution to initiate the switch to reusable packaging: we drew up a proof of concept for a smart reuse platform for coffee cups. Unlike existing systems that work with a deposit, we developed a platform for borrowing and returning reusable packaging without requiring users to pay a cash deposit. Moreover, this platform allows us to collect a whole range of data, such as how long a user owns the packaging, how many times a packaging is used and where the packaging is borrowed and returned.
Our goal is to obtain an efficient and high-performance reuse system that will enable us to initiate the transition to reusable packaging on a large scale.
CORE
Partners Stad Leuven, KU Leuven, Borealis, Quppa BV
Sectors
By merging with the company Red-use, we are now combining our experience from this project with Red-use's experience in reuse networks for food bowls in Hasselt and Mechelen. With this strengthened team, we will continue with determination to make our concept widely available in Belgium.
Although we did not achieve our goal of rolling out Quppa on a large scale in Leuven and other cities, this project has given us many new insights and we are proud to be able to get the ball rolling further this way. We now understand better than ever the pain points of such systems, and we are fully gathering the final pieces of the puzzle to achieve our goals.