Belgium-based cleaning product company Ecover launched a pop-up café in London that accepted customers’ recyclable plastic waste as payment. The Rubbish Café in Covent Garden is part of the company’s broader push to eliminate single-use plastic packaging.
Open for two days in early May, the café served a “zero-waste” menu that could be paid for with a piece of recyclable plastic waste such as drink bottles, soup containers, and milk containers. Chef Tom Hunt prepared food that included banana bread made from wonky fruit, Time Out London reported. Eco-designer Max McMurdo created the upcycled decor.
“We have a strong leadership on plastic, a topic that has gained hugely in traction,” Victoria Hunt-Taylor, Ecover’s UK head of marketing told PR Week. “Our media strategy was all about bringing that position to life in a challenger brand way.”
The company, which was founded 39 years ago, says it’s waging war on virgin plastic with commitments to increase their use of recycled plastic over the next three years. Besides the café, Ecover says the goal is to make all their bottles from 100% recycled plastic by 2020.
Recently the company redesigned their Washing Up Liquid bottle to be made from 100% recycled PET. It’s also 100% recyclable, including the plastic polypropylene cap. The new cap uses less plastic than their previous one, saving an estimated 14 metric tons a year from the manufacturing process based on predicted sales volumes for 2018, Ecover says.
Although the plastic in most bottle caps is technically recyclable, there aren’t enough facilities to recycle them due to a perceived lack of value, according to the company. Ecover’s team says they want to help stimulate demand with their packaging.
At the same time, the company is planning to begin testing alternative biodegradable and bio-sourced packaging such as corn or potato-based plastics, or fiber-based pulp from wood, straw or wastepaper, likely with a degradable lining.
Ecover isn’t alone in rethinking plastic laundry detergent containers. In March, the German chemical and consumer goods company Henkel announced an effort to gather plastic waste from waterways and turn it into Lovable laundry brand bottles. Last year plastic made up around half of the company’s overall packaging footprint. “We focus on mono-materials, which can be recycled particularly efficiently,” Henkel said at the time.
