Today, the Consortium to Reinvent the Retail
Bag, managed by Closed
Loop Partners, reached a significant milestone a year after its
founding:
the launch of a series of first-of-a-kind, multi-retailer pilots to advance
sustainable alternatives to the single-use plastic bag and accelerate their
potential to scale. The six-week pilots will help refine winning solutions from
the Consortium’s global Beyond the Bag innovation challenge, evaluating
everything from technical feasibility to desirability.
Beyond the Bag Challenge
winners
ChicoBag, Fill It Forward, GOATOTE and
99Bridges will begin pilots across a total of nine
stores of the Consortium's Founding Partners — CVS
Health,
Target and Walmart — in
Northern California. The solutions being tested include multiple reusable bag
models alongside enabling technologies — which address customers’ needs, extend
the useful life of retail bags and provide visibility into the full lifecycle of
a bag. Across the select stores, customers can sign up and try these new
solutions — whether it's to borrow, incentivize or receive reminders to use a
reusable bag. The partnership among leading retailers’ different stores sets an
exciting precedent; collaboration will help accelerate pathways to scale and
help address the systemic challenge of plastic bag waste.
In addition to the in-store pilots, other winning solutions from the Beyond the
Bag Challenge will be piloted and tested in different contexts.
Returnity
and
Eon
will pilot through Walmart delivery in select markets to test a different part
of the retail system, knowing that people shop in various ways — ranging from at
home to in store. Meanwhile, materials innovators
Domtar,
PlasticFri and Sway
will undergo rigorous performance and recovery testing to optimize their designs
to meet the needs of retailers and customers, and match the specifications of
recycling and composting facilities.
“To permanently eliminate the 100 billion single-use plastic bags currently used
every year in the US, we are working collaboratively to build retail solutions
that better meet customer needs while lessening the impact on the environment.
By testing new bag innovations in-store, we gain valuable insights that allow us
to iterate quickly and expand to more communities,” says Kate Daly, Managing
Director of the Center for the Circular Economy at Closed Loop Partners.
“Knowing that systems change does not happen overnight, these pilots are an essential step to test, incorporate customer and retailer feedback, and
improve new solutions, exploring pathways to scale.”
Transforming cosmetics packaging through collaboration
Join us as leading beauty retailer Ulta Beauty and Pact Collective share insights into how to maximize the transformative potential of partnerships, mentorship and pre-competitive alliances to overcome industry-wide challenges, reveal new solutions, and advance sustainability in materials and packaging for beauty and personal-care products - Tues, Oct. 15, at SB'24 San Diego.
This phase of experimentation is essential to the collaborative work of the
broader Consortium — which includes additional Partners DICK’S Sporting
Goods, Dollar General, The Kroger Co., The TJX Companies, Ulta
Beauty, Ahold Delhaize USA Brands, Albertsons Companies, Hy-Vee,
Meijer, Wakefern Food Corp and Walgreens. The lessons learned from
the pilots will help inform further iterations of the solutions and where more
testing and investment is needed.
The tests and pilots are just one part of the Consortium’s complementary
workstreams — which span innovation, advancing materials recovery through
infrastructure investments, identifying best practices for policy and engaging
consumers — all underpinned by work with key stakeholders across the entire bag
value chain.
“We envision a retail industry where alternatives to the single-use plastic bag
are easy and accessible for all communities. We’re proud to work together toward
this goal alongside CVS Health and Walmart — as co-creation is key to our new
sustainability strategy, Target
Forward,”
says Amanda Nusz, SVP of Corporate Responsibility at Target and President of
the Target Foundation. “We are thrilled to pilot these winning designs, as we
know that collaboration and continuous iteration are integral to developing new
potential solutions.”
The pilots will run through early fall; the Consortium looks forward to sharing
the insights gathered to help realize a more circular future for retail.
Click here to learn more about the pilots, where they are happening and the innovators participating.
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Sustainable Brands Staff
Published Aug 2, 2021 9am EDT / 6am PDT / 2pm BST / 3pm CEST