By Meg Wilcox for Civil Eats.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for Commonwealth News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

At Johnny’s Luncheonette, a family-style diner in the greater Boston area serving sandwiches and breakfast all day, customers can take their meal to go in a lime-green, durable plastic container that is borrowed like a library book and designed to be reused hundreds, if not thousands, of times by other restaurant patrons.

Customers don’t pay extra for the reusable take-out box. They simply need to download an app called Recirclable, and—to avoid paying a $15 fee—return the container within two weeks to one of 14 restaurants participating in Recirclable’s reuse program.

Johnny’s Luncheonette is among a small but growing number of restaurants taking steps to move away from single-use plastic take-out containers, which usually end up in the trash because they can’t be recycled. Worse yet, mismanaged plastic waste eventually enters the oceans, where it kills sea creatures that ingest it and breaks apart into toxic microplastics the size of a lentil or smaller.

Restaurants and food services use nearly 1 trillion pieces of disposable food service ware and packaging annually in the U.S., according to Upstream, a reuse advocacy organization.

Johnny’s Luncheonette began offering the reusable take-out containers earlier this year because its owner, Kay Masterson, was tired of the Sisyphean search for an environmentally friendly disposable take-out box. “Ideas like Recirclable are a much better option because it takes out the conversation of, ‘Well, which takeout container is less bad?’” she said. “Reuse is just smart. It’s smart resource-wise. It’s smart cost-wise.”

Masterson pays more per piece for the reusable packaging but said that she expects costs will drop below disposable packaging as more customers use the service. Thus far, only dozens of customers have selected the reusable option.

Many case studies show that while reusable containers cost more upfront, businesses start to save fairly quickly. What’s more, “It’s not just about saving money but about building resiliency so that you have shorter supply chains without so much global dependency,” said Elizabeth Balkan, director of Reloop America, at Reloop, a nonprofit operating in both Europe and the U.S.

Moving from single use to reuse is one of the biggest opportunities for reducing plastic pollution, according to a report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a reuse pioneer. Reuse services targeting food businesses are growing quickly in the U.S., especially for arenas and stadiums, colleges and K-12 schools, corporate offices, and other institutions.

Startups offering logistics and dishwashing are proliferating, as are nonprofit organizations providing strategic support, funding, and advocacy. But reuse is still far from the norm in the U.S. Communities need shared reuse infrastructure for the practice to pick up steam, according to Crystal Dreisbach, CEO of Upstream. Cohesive, city-scale systems could help shift consumer habits and increase the volume of materials being reused, which is essential for both economic and environmental impact. Enabling policies would hasten the transition.

“You can’t have consumers running all over town, dropping off things in [different] places. You’re going to need big infrastructure that will accommodate this massive systemic change away from disposable to reusable,” Dreisbach said.

Reuse on the Rise

Reuse services are emerging in cities across the country, from the Bay Area to Brooklyn. Startups like Vessel and Turn Systems offer customers a reusable cup option at the point of sale that can be returned at kiosks or bins. DeliverZero provides reusable take-out containers at some 150 restaurants in New York City, Boulder, Colorado, and California, and at Whole Foods stores in Boulder. Usefull offers stainless steel containers on college campuses. Bold Reuse services large venues in Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Kansas City, and Phoenix, while Dispatch Goods in San Francisco and ReUso in Chicago serve restaurants and institutions.

Dishwashing and sanitizing systems are also emerging, since they’re key to any reuse system. Restaurants handle their own dishwashing in Recirclable’s system. Other reuse companies provide dishwashing, including via mobile units at large venues, or contract it out to large washing stations like Re:Dish, which operates in New York City and Philadelphia and is equipped with technologies for tracking and sorting packaging.

ReThink Disposable provides free reuse consulting to restaurants, institutions, and large venues in Minnesota, California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New England. The nonprofit also raises funding to buy reusable packaging and/or install dishwashers at restaurants and food delivery programs run by nonprofits, such as Truro Community Kitchen.

Reusable containers come in ceramic, glass, stainless steel, and plastic, depending on the venue, but, for takeout, “most restaurant owners prefer durable, No. 5 plastic [polypropylene type] because they store and stack easily,” are lightweight, and can be microwaved, said Amber Schmidt, New England zero-waste specialist at ReThink Disposable.

While “reusable plastic may be an imperfect solution, it is still a critically important step in the right direction,” toward an overall reduction in plastic packaging, Balkan said.

Volume Is Key

Recirclable was co-founded in 2021 by Margie Bell, who worked for decades on ecommerce and point-of-sale applications in the software industry. “Our vision was, ‘Let’s have this happening at every restaurant and, like library books, you borrow at one and you return to another.’” 

Recirclable’s volume is small. Its users are dedicated customers who follow it from restaurant to restaurant, Bell told Civil Eats. “We’re in the thousands—and we’d love to be in the tens and hundreds of thousands—but we have to grow the network” of restaurants.

“The biggest hurdle with Recirclable is just getting the word out there and changing habits,” said Masterson.

Recirclable’s small network of restaurants also limits its growth. Customers must live near a restaurant where they can return the container, or the system doesn’t work for them. The number of steps required is another barrier. Johnny’s Luncheonette Manager David Martinez said that when some interested people learn they have to download an app and put in their credit card, they decline.

“We recognize that can cause friction,” said Bell, who won an award from the EPA to develop a new system, launching this year, that will be accessed with one tap of a credit card.

Recirclable is not alone in having difficulty reaching volume—“the cornerstone” of reuse, Dreisbach said. “You cannot make the system work, you cannot make the economics work, until you have volume.”

Re:Dish’s washing station in Brooklyn, for example, can handle 75,000 reusables daily, but “we’re not anywhere near there right now,” CEO and founder Caroline Vanderlip told Civil Eats. Re:Dish is on track to handle 4.5 million containers this year, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the trillion pieces of packaging used in the food sector, she said.

Transformational Change

To scale up reuse, Dreisbach envisions municipal waste and recycling centers becoming reuse centers. Reuse represents “a really cool new revenue stream” for recycling facilities, which struggle with volatility in recovered materials markets, she said.

Private investment, government funding—including from the Inflation Reduction Act—and forward service contracts with large anchor clients such as arenas could support such infrastructure development. The nonprofit Perpetual, in fact, is now working to design and implement city-scale reusable food service ware solutions in collaboration with Ann Arbor, Michigan; Hilo, Hawaii; Galveston, Texas; and Savannah, Georgia.

Laws mandating reuse would hasten the transition, as they have in Europe, where reuse is more widespread, Balkan told Civil Eats. Oregon, California, and Maine have passed laws moving in this direction that will raise funds for reuse, she said.

But big consumer brands also need to lead the way on shaping consumer attitudes about reuse, said Driesbach. “They have a great deal of power to decide what that packaging is,” she said, adding that consumers are ready for reuse. “COVID really showed us what appeared in our trash cans at home because we were all getting takeout. Awareness about trash has increased hugely in the last five years.”


Meg Wilcox wrote this article for Civil Eats.


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Designers and stylists will showcase their "upcycled" garments as models hit the runway for what is being dubbed a "trashion show" at the Waste EXPO in Las Vegas next month.

It is estimated the average American household spends around $1,500 a year on clothing.

Sonja Salmon, associate professor of textiles at North Carolina State University, said whether the items wear thin or go out of style, only a small fraction of them are actually recycled. She noted the industry is realizing more must be done to reuse materials.

"Textile fibers are really amazing materials," Salmon pointed out. "We wear them, they're on our bodies, they feel good, they make us happy. They're also a resource. They have chemistry in them, they have materials in them that deserve to be recycled and reused."

Salmon stressed millions of tons of textile waste end up in U.S. landfills each year. It not only takes a long time to break down but is a lost opportunity for reuse. She added companies have started to incentivize buyback programs, a step in the right direction. The Waste EXPO is May 5-8 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Salmon emphasized the Waste360 "trashion" runway will get people thinking differently about the use of fabrics. She explained today's clothes are primarily made up of synthetic fibers like polyester and natural fibers like cotton. Blended pieces are good for durability and comfort but are challenging to break down.

They have to be separated before recycling, so she pointed to the need for better collection and sorting technologies.

"So that large amounts of those materials can go to recycling processes," Salmon added. "I'm actually excited because Goodwill, an organization that we associate with clothing donation, is actually starting to think about its own role in helping the recycling process, in terms of collection and sorting."

Salmon encouraged shoppers to look to Goodwill and other thrift stores to purchase used clothing and participate in take-back programs to help sort materials for recycling. Consumers can also consider renting special-occasion clothing instead of buying.


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By Carolyn Beans for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Broadcast version by Judith Ruiz-Branch for Wisconsin News Connection reporting for the Pulitzer Center-Public News Service Collaboration.

Every year, US dairy producers churn out billions of pounds of cheese—over 14 billion in 2023 alone. As that cheese heads to market, producers must contend with what’s left behind: roughly 6 billion pounds of whey by dry weight, says Declan Roche, chief commercial officer of Foremost Farms USA, a Wisconsin-based dairy cooperative.

Untreated whey can’t be released into waterways. Although it’s about 94% water, the whey’s nutrients would trigger algae blooms, sucking oxygen from water and killing fish. Instead, many cheese producers filter out the protein to sell it as protein powder. But this process leaves behind another by-product, known as whey permeate. Producers might then salvage lactose from the permeate to sell for other uses. Even so, recovering lactose through mechanical processes is expensive. The profits are meager, Roche says. “It’s a least loss option.”

Microbes might offer a better way to manage wastewater. Today, researchers across industries, from food production to textiles to tech, are turning to microbes and their molecules to churn out marketable products as diverse as bioplastics, biofuel, metals, and animal feed (1). The ultimate goal is to transform industries, so waste gets cycled back into production rather than ending up in landfills. It’s a field that’s been “exploding” in the last five years, says environmental engineer Ezequiel Santillan of the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering.

Last year, Foremost Farms partnered with a Boston-based biotech company to develop a microbe-powered system that generates new products from the co-op’s waste. And university researchers are moving from the lab to large-scale pilots. “We’re creating a lot more economic value out of what is already there,” says Erica Majumder, a microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW-Madison), who is studying dairy waste. “[Waste] actually becomes another revenue stream.”

A Circular Bioeconomy

Microbes are already at work digesting nutrients in many industrial waste streams. But these systems don’t typically make desirable products. Once the water is cleaned up and released, the microbes left behind become another type of waste to deal with, Santillan says. At the same time, industries use microbes to generate products through fermentation, including beer, biofuels, and insulin. But these microbes need to be fed. Their meals often consist of crops farmed for this purpose, which leaves less land to grow food for human consumption

Santillan, Majumder, and others want to bring these two processes together: Microbes feeding on the industrial wastewater would be generating the marketable products at the same time. “There are lots and lots of different microorganisms that are very capable of metabolizing the huge variety of chemical compounds that are in waste streams,” Majumder says. These microbes could play a key role in shifting societies toward what’s called a circular bioeconomy.

“The idea of the circular economy is to keep materials in use as much as possible and for as long as possible,” Santillan says. The longer materials stay in circulation, the less waste and the more sustainable the industry is. Metals and plastics, for example, can be recycled through chemical or physical processes.

A fully circular bioeconomy, meanwhile, relies on renewable resources to make products and, often, microbes to do the recycling. Microbes are especially good at recycling resources that are dispersed in liquids, even at low concentrations. “When we have highly complex mixtures, that’s really difficult for chemical or mechanical processes to handle,” Majumder says.

From Dairy Waste to Plastics

When Majumder sees dairy waste, she sees the building blocks for bioplastics. Plastics have traditionally epitomized a linear economy. Fossil fuels extracted from the earth get separated and transformed into petrochemicals. Those chemicals are then formed into plastic products that are often used only briefly before being discarded. An estimated 79% of the 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic discarded globally through 2015 ended up in landfills or the environment (2).

But plastics don’t have to come from fossil fuels. Many bacteria can naturally produce plastic polymers, such as polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB). This easily biodegradable plastic performs much like polypropylene, and it is already being used in some applications, including food packaging and disposable utensils. (PHB does release methane as it biodegrades, but no more so than conventional composting, Majumder says.)

Other bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, can be engineered to make these same plastics. In labs, microbiologists have successfully grown PHB-producing microbes on foods like cornstarch. But it’s dramatically more expensive than producing plastics from fossil fuels.

Majumder has been working with Deepak Kumar, a bioprocess scientist at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, to identify industry waste streams that could feed plastic-producing microbes at a lower cost. One of the team’s most promising waste targets is another dairy by-product: acid whey. Unlike the whey left over from cheese making, acid whey—from Greek yogurt and cottage cheese production—is highly acidic. That makes acid whey even more challenging to safely discard. But it’s also chock-full of lactose and lactic acid, which many microbes will happily digest.

Majumder and Kumar grew a strain of E. coli engineered to produce PHB on acid whey collected from a local creamery. Untreated, acid whey is so acidic that it would quickly kill off E. coli and destroy any plastics that the microbes managed to produce. But by raising the pH and adding some additional ingredients, such as minerals and salts, the team created an environment where the microbes thrived.

The microbes fed on the lactose and lactic acid, recycling the nutrients’ carbon molecules into the backbone of PHB, which accumulated inside their cells. Ultimately, when the team harvested and dried the E. coli, 70% of the microbes’ dry weight was made up of this bioplastic (3). A dairy producer could extract the PHB and ship it to a plastics company just like any raw polymer derived from fossil fuels, Majumder says. What’s more, in producing PHB, the microbes digested 96% of the whey’s lactose and over 61% of the lactic acid (3).

This team has shown from start to finish how microbes can transform waste that’s available on many dairy plants right now, says Stephanie Lansing, a bioenergy and biotechnology expert at the University of Maryland in College Park, who was not involved in the research. Lansing studies how microbes can generate bioplastics when fed on food waste (4). The environment benefits, she says. “You’re taking something that you might have to treat—and use energy to treat—and you’re turning it into a beneficial product.”

Foraging for Metal

Other researchers have their sights on wastewater from the tech industry. Producing microchips, films, and many other high-tech components relies on expensive metals, including gallium, germanium, and indium. These metals are considered critical elements because they are in high demand, but their supply is not assured, says biochemical and environmental engineer Rohan Jain. Small fragments of these metals end up in wastewater at multiple steps of the production process, including during etching and polishing. The metal concentrations in wastewater are high enough to make the water toxic and expensive to treat, yet low enough to make retrieving the metals difficult.

But Jain is using iron-loving molecules naturally produced by bacteria to capture these metals. Many bacteria send out these molecules, known as siderophores, to bind to iron and retrieve it from the environment, Jain explains. Because gallium, germanium, and indium are structurally similar to iron, siderophores can find and bind to these metals too, even in liquids with metal concentrations as low as 300 parts per million (5).

Jain’s team at the Helmholtz Institute Freiberg for Resource Technology, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, in Germany, began developing siderophores into a technology for recovering metals from wastewater in 2016. The researchers first targeted gallium. “Will [the siderophores] survive the wastewater conditions? Can you regenerate them? Concentrate them?” Jain recalls asking. “All those environmental engineering problems were unknown.”

In 2019, the team reported that it had extracted gallium from wastewater collected from a factory after the production of silicon wafers (6). Siderophores found and stuck to 100% of the gallium. The team then added an acid that separated most of the gallium from the siderophores. In an industrial setting, that gallium could then be cycled back into production and the siderophores put to work again, Jain says.

The team is now operating a pilot-scale system that processes 1,000 liters of wastewater daily. The system relies on the only two commercially available siderophores—one synthetic and the other harnessed from bacteria. Neither is currently used by companies for drawing metals from industrial waste streams.

Jain is also screening siderophores to identify the most effective foragers for specific metals. “We know that there are more than 500 types of siderophores with different structures,” he says. He uses computer modeling to predict which siderophores will work best and then grows the bacteria to harness the siderophores and test his predictions (5).

Interest in recycling metals from wastewater is growing, he says, especially after China began limiting exports of gallium and germanium last year (7). While his system might prove economical for extracting a large percentage of many different metals in water, he notes that it can’t recover everything. “That last 5%,” Jain says, “would cost you an enormous amount of energy, time, and money.”

Microbes to Feed the Masses

Instead of generating some useful product, microbes feeding on wastewater streams can instead be the product. In 2020, Santillan’s team began analyzing the contents of wastewater collected from Mr Bean, a soybean processing company in Singapore (8). The water contained nutrients including salts and sugars, as well as a community of microbes that colonized this rich food source on their own. The team placed the wastewater into bioreactors in the lab. “As the microbes grow, they generate protein through their biological metabolism, so you make protein out of simple, or even more complex, carbon compounds,” Santillan says. The result: a protein-rich mass of microbes, plus water clean enough to be discharged or cycled back into production.

In January 2024, the team reported on what happened when they added these microbes into an aquaculture feed for Asian sea bass (9). Today, sea bass and other carnivorous fish raised in aquaculture are often fed fishmeal and oil from wild-caught fish, such as sardines and anchovies (10). But as aquaculture expands, there’s a growing need for alternatives that won’t deplete natural fish populations.

After swapping out half of the fishmeal in sea bass feed with the protein-rich microbes, Santillan’s team found that young fish survived and gained just as much weight as those raised on conventional feed (9).

Turning to microbes for feed could reduce the environmental impact of aquaculture. It could also aid the Singapore government’s mission to increase its food security by producing 30% of its own food by 2030, Santillan says. Currently, the country generates only about 10% of the food it consumes. “In Singapore, the only reasonable animal protein industry that has the space to grow is aquaculture,” he says. “But all the fish feed that they use is imported.” Meanwhile, wastewater from soybean processing is local, abundant, and costly to treat. “The goal is to connect these two needs,” Santillan says.

Based on the success of his soybean wastewater study, Santillan says that he and his team are now collaborating with Mr Bean and other partners to try to develop an industrial-scale demonstration facility adjacent to a soybean processing plant. He’s hoping it will prove the economic feasibility of his system. “We need to have a demonstration plant where we can produce, instead of kilograms of microbial protein, tons of microbial protein,” he says. But pulling it off will require buy-in from companies across the soybean, fish feed, and aquaculture industries, as well as investors.
From Lab to Factory

For any of these processes to work at an industrial scale, companies will have to build bioreactors to treat the waste where it is produced. “If you have to drive tankers full of this waste long distances, that negates a lot of the sustainability gains,” Majumder says.

At the UW-Madison Center for Dairy Research, a 400-liter bioreactor now sits alongside the dairy production facilities. There, Majumder is exploring how her team’s technology could work on a larger scale. Other UW-Madison researchers interested in turning waste into other products will also have access to the bioreactor.

For now, it’s hard for emerging microbe-driven, wastewater-repurposing technologies to compete with decades-old practices, says Piergiuseppe Morone, an economist at The University of Rome Unitelma Sapienza and a co-author of the 2023 book The Circular Bioeconomy: Theories and Tools for Economists and Sustainability Scientists. His research suggests that bio-based certification labels could help tip the balance. Some consumers, he says, are willing to pay more for products derived from bio-based materials and produced in a socially and environmentally responsible way (11).

But moving toward an economy that is environmentally sustainable requires not only the willingness to pay a small green premium, but also radical changes in production practices and consumer mindset, Morone says. “The idea of associating well-being with the accumulation of more and more goods is something that is no longer feasible,” he says. Consumers should instead measure well-being based on their access to goods and services they truly need, he says, such as access to transportation, rather than ownership of a car.

As for Roche of Foremost Farms, he hopes that turning dairy waste into new products will ultimately increase the value of milk—a pressing need for dairy producers who have struggled to cover the cost of production in recent years. What product exactly his team’s new microbe-powered system will generate isn’t yet public. But he says the possibilities extend far beyond food and extend into the chemical and energy industries. “We’re the largest cheese maker in Wisconsin,” Roche says. “But for the co-op to prosper and grow, value-added products need to be generated from every component of the milk.” Microbes, he hopes, will help make that happen.


Carolyn Beans wrote this article for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.


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Kane County officials plan to launch four composting programs at large-scale facilities to reduce food waste, as part of meeting the county's climate goal to reduce greenhouse gases.

A $500,000 federal grant will pay for waste management programs at the Northern Illinois Food Bank and other large facilities that struggle with food waste.

Clair Ryan, recycling program coordinator for Kane County, said the partnerships came about serendipitously, beginning with the food bank. It receives sizable perishable and canned food donations, some of which are already spoiled, and asked if the county had resources to help them address food waste.

"And I said, 'Well no, we don't at the moment, but there's this grant opportunity...'" Ryan recounted. "It kind of got me thinking, 'OK, so if we can make this happen for the food bank, where else can we do it?'"

Northern Illinois Food Bank is one of the largest in the state. Through the composting program, it will implement a process to unpackage fruits and vegetables for anaerobic digestion.

Other program partners include the Kane County Adult Corrections Facility, the Kane County Cougars stadium, and Sherman Hospital in Elgin. Due to a new state law requiring large event facilities to provide recycling and composting bins, Ryan emphasized the partnership with the Cougars stadium seemed like a natural fit.

"The upshot of all of it is that we're going to be able to, over the course of the two-year project, divert about a million pounds of food waste," Ryan pointed out. "Keep it out of landfills, stop it from degrading straight into methane that contributes to climate change."

The program will also provide funds to purchase compost for distribution to small farms and community gardens throughout the county. In the long term, Ryan hopes to establish a dedicated food scrap drop-off point at Kane County's recycling center to encourage more community participation in the composting efforts.


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