Reusing Our Way Out of the Waste Crisis

If you are familiar with the concept of a circular economy, then you would know that it is necessary to prioritise reducing and reusing over recycling to build a truly sustainable waste system. Recycling attempts to manage waste after it is created, while the former two help avoid waste altogether, and that’s exactly what we need - to reduce the burden on our inadequate recycling systems and landfills.

Reuse at large scale

Reuse is currently seen as an individual effort. However, like any other action, it is limited to the boundaries set by the larger system. Beyond a point, how many glass jars can you store in your kitchen? How many grocery delivery bags can you accumulate with little idea on what to do with them? It is not your fault, atleast not entirely. There needs to be a system for reuse - where packaging waste is collected back, sanitised and reused again for another customer. And that’s exactly what we’re building at Reverse.

Reuse-as-a-service

At Reverse, we enable reuse end-to-end. Starting from collection of waste from individuals and bulk generators, we take care of sorting them based on the brand, then clean them thoroughly at our state-of-the-art sanitisation plant, and deliver them to the respective brands, who can use them as packaging for their fresh batch of products!

Power of collaboration

We make it happen through partnerships with various stakeholders. One one hand, we partner with apartment societies and communities to set up collection systems for individuals. On the other hand, we partner with HORECAs (hotels, restaurants and cafes), as well as events and FMCG brands to enable reuse for their bulk waste. Together, we are building an ecosystem for reuse in India.

So far, we have partnered with 30+ brands, 100+ HoReCas diverted 1.2 million+ kg of waste from landfills, and as a result avoided a whopping 1380+ tonnes of CO2e emissions. As a result, we have also enabled a reduction of 30% in packaging costs and created 250+ livelihoods.

What can be reused?

We started off with just glass bottles. We built India's first indigenously designed packaging material sanitization plant, and our glass bottles go through a thorough 8-step sanitisation process to be good-as-new for reuse. After successfully enabling reuse of over 1.9 million bottles, we are now expanding to other categories of packaging - carton boxes, paper bags, cloth bags, gel packs and rigid plastics - all of which are problematic waste generators with high potential for reuse. Packaging waste makes up 20-30% of total municipal solid waste, and reducing this number could be highly impactful for the overall waste system.

Join the Reuse Revolution!

This is just the beginning. We have exciting plans in the future to further simplify and make reuse more accessible and easy. We are building a full-stack blockchain based reuse platform that is traceable and scalable. In the next 4 years, our plan is to expand to 10 states, with 200+ brand partners and a capacity of 15,000 MT across 5 different packaging materials.

As we steadily grow to make reuse the norm, we rely in the power of community and collaboration to amplify our impact. Follow us on instagram and get your community involved with us!