Leading food service packaging supplier Depa and reverse vending specialist Tomra have teamed up to provide a reusable packaging solution for the Food Unplugged festival this year in Holland.
The sustainability conscious forest event takes place on June 21 at the World Food Center site in Ede. It brings together professionals from across the food chain — farmers, chefs, producers, hospitality entrepreneurs, marketeers, policy makers, journalists, scientists — to stimulate the transition in agri-food from price to value.
Depa is supplying reusable EcoCore® cups for the event. Customers return them via a Tomra reverse vending machine, branded for the event, that provides rewards via a smartphone app.
"There's a lot of focus on reverse vending for recycling at the moment, but with the European Single Use Packaging directive asking countries to cut its use, the same technology will also be used for reusables," says Chris Bocking, CEO at Bockatech.
"Reverse vending automation is helping to bring down the cost of recapture, increase the amount of this with incentives and ensure that container stocks aren't mixed with other packaging."
Reusables are collected by a Depa branded Tomra reverse vending machine
Cups made with EcoCore® are ideal for reverse vending recapture as they are easy for the system to identify and robust to allow internal handling and compact storage.
Using reusable food service packaging in place of bio and non-biodegradable single use alternatives significantly reduces environmental impacts such as green house gas production. Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) carried out for Bockatech has shown that CO2 production is halved after just seven uses.