Ordering food home waste-free

January 2023
Who hasn't experienced it? It's cold and wet outside, you make yourself comfortable on the sofa and order your favourite crispy pizza before watching another episode of a series. Until now, unfortunately, this ritual has always involved a lot of waste. For many, the packaging waste already piles up after a short time. We want to change that and are therefore working with committed partners on innovative solutions.

Ordering food home is booming. Even before the Corona pandemic, the delivery sector was growing strongly. Although the order volume has reduced compared to the record year 2020, the trend remains unbroken. Unfortunately, this boom also causes huge amounts of packaging waste that cannot l be recycled.

We want to do something about this. We are working with a selection of restaurants from our network of over 1800 partner businesses and delivery platforms to develop and test different solutions for ordering food home without waste. We are convinced: convenience can also be waste-free.

Deposit-free lending and low-CO2 delivery by bicycle (Bern)

In Bern, we have been running a pilot project in cooperation with the platform “schnellerteller.ch” since March 2022. The aim is to enable deposit-free lending of reCIRCLE products in addition to waste-free food delivery. All you need for this is the reCIRCLE app.

This is how it works:

  1. Download the reCIRCLE app and create an account
  2. Go to schnellerteller.ch and choose a restaurant that offers reCIRCLE products
  3. When everything you want is in the basket, add up the number of dishes with the reCIRCLE logo. This is the number of BOXes you need to borrow.
  4. Back in the reCIRCLE app, select the desired restaurant under “Delivery service” and select “Generate Zero Waste ID”.
  5. Enter the number of BOXes you want to borrow.
  6. Now you can generate the “Zero Waste ID” and enter it in the corresponding field on schnellerteller.ch when paying.
  7. Your food will then be delivered in reCIRCLES.

Within the next seven days, you can return the reCIRCLE BOXes to an app partner. If you do not manage to do this, you will be charged CHF 10 plus a processing fee for each BOX you borrowed. You want to return the reCIRCLES at a later date? Return them to one of our BOX partners and receive CHF 10.- per BOX. Very simple.

Thai food specialities delivered to your home without waste – with or without deposit (Bern)

As a long-standing partner, the innovative team was immediately willing to take the plunge. You have the choice of paying for the products or getting them deposit-free via the reCIRCLE app.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Call Thai Food Kurier and tell them you want your order in reCIRCLEs.
  2. Choose whether you would like to receive them via the app or prefer to pay CHF 10 per BOX.
  3. If you want to order without a deposit, you can borrow the BOXes from the courier via the app. To do this, show the courier the app screen. 4.
  4. You can return the borrowed BOX to our app partners, purchased BOXes to around 1800 reCIRCLE partner businesses.

Over 30 restaurants on Uber Eats offer waste-free food delivery (nationwide)

We also work with one of the largest delivery platforms in the world, Uber Eats. Already more than 30 of our partner establishments offer a selection of their food in reCIRCLE products.

  1. select restaurants that offer “zero waste dishes
  2. choose your meals under the category “Zero Waste Dishes” and pay for the BOX at check-out
  3. return the products to one of our over 1800 partner restaurants and get your money back.

This is just the beginning – we are already planning further initiatives and want to learn from the experiences of the first pilot projects and continuously improve our offer. We therefore welcome feedback of any kind. If your favourite restaurant is not yet included, please let us know at info@recircle.ch.

 

Pinar Göksu
Digitalisation

#zero waste #delivery