A recent study by Accenture and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) showed that consumers want more courses of action that enable a circular economy by ensuring longer shelf life and reuse of products in a bid to tackle the impact of climate change. This includes better packaging design and recycling of waste. In fact, over 30 per cent of consumers ranked sustainable ingredients and packaging as top factors in choosing sustainable disposal options in everyday shopping.
This demand is understandable considering the fact that the environmental impact of food packaging is enormous. While modern food packaging provides a way to make food safe, reliable, shelf-stable and clean, unfortunately, most of them are designed to be single-use. This means they are typically thrown away rather than reused or recycled, especially in places with substandard waste management.
This is why barePack and &Repeat are calling for more collective efforts to sustain the planet.
To put an end to single-use packaging in the restaurant business, these two players have come together to offer a more complete and unique circular economy solution for the food industry in Europe and Asia. &Repeat is an app that financially rewards people when they recycle their food packaging while barePack is a reuse network in Southeast Asia and France.
In Singapore, barePack and &Repeat function as a reuse ecosystem where people can order their food as usual. However, instead of receiving it in single-use containers, they will receive their meal in beautiful reusable boxes. After their meal, the user can drop off the containers anywhere in the network, at any partner restaurant.
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Recently &Repeat has completed the acquisition of barePack as part of their effort to rapidly scale towards greener choices.
In an exclusive interview with e27, &Repeat CEO and Co-Founder Tor Espen shares about the acquisition of the company. “With the acquisition comes the ambition for an even bigger impact. We want to move the industry and society toward more sustainable practices and behaviours, whether it is recycling or reuse. To support this transformation we are aligning the two brands and barePack will probably become &Repeat in the long run when we merge the two user journeys (recycling and reuse).”
He further says, “More than 9,000 single-use packagings are thrown away every second. We all know it causes water pollution in Asia and everywhere in the world. We need to reduce drastically the number of single-use items and we decided to launch &Repeat in order to create an ecosystem where restaurants and users go together to battle these challenges.”
As part of their mission, the two companies have been allocating resources to train and educate the clients of their partner restaurants on the matters of waste reduction, recycling and reuse.
&Repeat and barePack are now operating in Singapore, Sweden and France with more than 70,000 users on board, aiming to make a change and apply zero waste concepts to their everyday life. Besides they are also preparing the launch the service in at least one other European country by the end of 2022.
Espen further elaborates, “We are already the leader in circular packaging solutions for food in Europe and Asia, but we picture &Repeat to be a much broader movement with a significant impact on waste reduction. We need to onboard the people who already are making a change in their daily life and those who are not there yet.”
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Looking back at their important milestones and future plans, Espen says, “The acquisition of barePack, reaching 50,000 users and launching to new countries is pretty amazing milestones and it’s only the beginning!”
&Repeat itself raised EUR3 million in 2021 and is preparing new fundraising for 2022 to support its goals promote the circular economy in the market it is operating.
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Image Credit: barePack
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