Burger King Plans To Test Reusable Containers Starting Next Year (cnn.com) 61
Burger King is planning to test reusable containers starting next year as part of its efforts to reduce waste. From a report: The trial is part of a partnership with TerraCycle's zero-waste delivery platform, Loop. Customers can opt in for reusable packaging for menu items such as sandwiches, soft drinks and coffee. They can then return the reusable sandwich container or beverage cup to Burger King restaurants to be cleaned and reused. But for those who participate, the program comes with a cost: Customers will be charged a small deposit upon purchase, and once the packaging is returned, they'll receive a refund.
The reusable containers and cups will be introduced at select restaurants in New York, Portland and Tokyo. The fast food giant says it plans to add more cities following its first three locations afterward. The program is a part of the company's continuing sustainability efforts. In July, the fast food chain announced a version of its Whopper made from lemongrass-fed beef, which it said would cut methane emissions.
The reusable containers and cups will be introduced at select restaurants in New York, Portland and Tokyo. The fast food giant says it plans to add more cities following its first three locations afterward. The program is a part of the company's continuing sustainability efforts. In July, the fast food chain announced a version of its Whopper made from lemongrass-fed beef, which it said would cut methane emissions.
Okay (Score:2)
Most non-fast food restaurants reuse plates and cutlery. No issue with BK doing it.
Not a reason to actually eat BK though.
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Most non-fast food restaurants reuse plates and cutlery. No issue with BK doing it.
Not a reason to actually eat BK though.
I think it's great, but the deposit and refund isn't something I've encountered at a restaurant and smells of having to register my credit card into some bk app to use it in a practical manner. How the refunds are administered isn't covered in the article so I'm open to the possibility that they have a good solution, but I'm not holding my breath.
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Well, some industrious kids can sit and watch for parts that absentmindedly leave their containers behind and go grab them off the tables and turn them in for the
Re: Okay (Score:2)
You're right, as long as it doesn't catch on frequently enough to become a nuisance I don't mind sponsoring some industrious kids.
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The easiest - and in a way most sinister - way is to apply a discount on your order if you return the containers. This makes you financially invested in repeat business, if only by a few cents...
=Smidge=
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The "deposit" was part of the cost of the product and I got cash back for returning it. Very simple.
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Where I live we have that for most bottles, cans (drink, but not others) and you can return them to pretty much any grocery store. I might be wrong on this, but the way I've heard the german system works is that applies to all cans, but you need to keep your receipt and can only return them at the store you bought them in.
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California did that, and It's a good example of good intentions with bad outcomes because the state loves to legislate but doesn't like to follow up on anything.
They promised drop offs at all stores via automatic machines, and recycling centers.
First the machines broke down and were not replaced. There are none now.
Then the the recycling centers shrank down and eventually most went out of business because the state wasn't funding them like they promised from the deposit money.
Now, if you recycle cans and ma
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Here it's done with government oversight and works excellent except for possibly the part where it only applies to most beverage cans/bottles but I'm on the fence on that since the other part of recycling is waste sorting which exists and is also needed. Recycling is a complex issue not only practically and technically but also social and what works in one community doesn't necessarily work elsewhere. I'm not overly familiar with what legislation we have here, but I believe the pressure is on the producers
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How the refunds are administered isn't covered in the article so I'm open to the possibility that they have a good solution, but I'm not holding my breath.
The same way every car rental place does it - pre-auth on the card, final auth on the pre-auth amount minus the deposit if things are returned.
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Thanks, I've never seen that so I didn't know it was possible, but if it's done that way I'm all for it.
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Not a big variation on the deposit model for soft-drink and beer bottles seen in many places. Retailers charge the deposit during the transaction, and the refund is often done at facilities operated by the same. or another, retailer. In those places, non-cash payment methods have been used for years for the purchase.
The sticking point here is the refund: for bottles, still cash back, not credit on your Visa account.
The issue is most fast food restaurants do not have facilities for cleaning reusable dishes
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Interesting issue with the dishes. If I go to the local non-chain fast food I can get kebab on a plate with cutlery, when I go to macdonalds which has a kitchen twice it's size and four times the seats I can't, but then it wouldn't surprise me if they have an order of magnitude more customers.
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Yes, but reused cutlery is made of metal that can be industrial dish-washed. Likewise with plates and glasses, because they're made of ceramics or glass.
You can not reuse plastic.
A&W for the longest time, and may still do so, use glass mugs for all drink sizes, because that is what Root Beer was best served in. This was totally the right idea to have, but I'm sure more than one patron a day walked away or broke a mug, which is why you only got paper cups if you weren't eating inside.
Like this is the cor
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Totally inaccurate.
You can not reuse plastic.
Plastic containers are only for cold food, and even then, they can not be cleaned with dish washers, they melt.
Where have you been this century? I can buy ready meals in plastic containers that can be stuffed in the oven to cook, with no problem. If the packaging says so, it's fine. Furthermore, many plastic containers these days are microwaveable and can be washed in a dishwasher. Just look for the symbols, usually stamped on the bottom.
So like soda cans (Score:3)
Showing my age here, but when I was training on a naval reactor in CT, they had waste cans setup to give you your nickel back when you cranked the can into the wastebasket. I always thought that even if the consumer did nothing, the homeless would cash in, which Im perfectly fine with. Basically you would be prepaying for the labor to collect your shit and return it.
Im more interested in the last paragraph. As a fan of grass-fed beef and irish butter, does lemongrass differ from other grass in terms of methane or is it merely a taste thing? I know grains create lots of gas, ever hear of a corn fart? I know grasses can effect taste. If a dairy cow gets ahold of wild onion (same green onion you buy at the grocery) it gets into the milk and it tastes really bad. Does anyone know or know someone who knows about raising grass-fed cattle vs the various grasses it is fed?
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I fully expect the homeless to cause significant revenue loss for businesses that attempt this. We already have problems with the homeless digging through garbage cans and strewing trash everywhere, looking for aluminum cans
Re: So like soda cans (Score:2)
Thinking back to the late 80s I guess places like CT and VT started the first GIG economy with these nickel deposits.
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putting the return area for a cash reward inside of restaurants
You don't break into a restaurant to riffle through their garbage for some nickles. If you're already stealing then there's plenty of better stuff to steal. What you're describing happens to easily accessible trash cans, and less often than you're suggesting. The idea that we shouldn't pay for can recycling because sometimes someone makes a mess is going really overboard.
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putting the return area for a cash reward inside of restaurants
You don't break into a restaurant to riffle through their garbage for some nickles. If you're already stealing then there's plenty of better stuff to steal.
I was talking about people rifling through the garbage cans outdoors within a one-block radius of those stores, not the cans inside the stores.
What you're describing happens to easily accessible trash cans, and less often than you're suggesting.
Nearly every time I've walked in a downtown area of any city in the greater Bay Area for more than half an hour, I've seen someone rummaging through a garbage can for cans. If that's rare, I'd hate to see what commonplace would look like.
The idea that we shouldn't pay for can recycling because sometimes someone makes a mess is going really overboard.
Meh. The whole system is completely broken by design: charge someone money for recyclables so that they will return them in a dif
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I've seen someone rummaging through a garbage can for cans.
Sure, except that's not what you were talking about. I haven't lived in San Francisco, but this happens in New York too. It's rare that someone strews the garbage all around though, they just pick out the cans.
I don't know about reduced payouts for large volume, that seems like an abuse of the system which needs to be fixed with legislation, but single stream recycling is not the answer. That leads to too much contamination [fivethirtyeight.com].
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You'll notice that the biggest complaint was about contaminated paper, which I did mention needs to be separate. Yes, some glass can get lost in the waste stream if it is shattered. On the flip side, there's not much glass in the waste stream to begin with, whereas I'd imagine there are a *lot* of plastic containers that folks don't bother to deal with.
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Showing my age here, ... give you your nickel back when you cranked the can into the wastebasket.
Cans and homeless people? You can't be that old. We had glass bottles, and if you could not bother returning them for the deposit, you dropped them under the street waste bins (not in), so the kids could collect them and exchange for candy.
I don't know why Burger King can't use washable plates for dine-in customers. In Australia, McDonalds has long had a "McCafé " where you can get proper coffee in a ceramic cup (none of that drip-filter or Starbucks-type muck), and real food on plates. I hear the ide
"Lemon-grass fed beef" (Score:2)
"Lemon-grass fed beef"
These are not grass fed cattle roaming in fields of lemon grass (a tropical plant), but grain fed cattle being supplemented dried lemon grass while in feed lots.
Re: "Lemon-grass fed beef" (Score:2)
Sounds less appealing
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Showing my age here
I'm showing my location here as not in the USA, but deposit systems on beverage containers is commonplace in Europe and Australia.
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reusable food (Score:4, Informative)
But, will the containers have reusable contents? That's Burger King after all.
I've ate there thrice in my life (once in US, twice in Warsaw), and every time the stuff quickly but painfully evacuated itself as a liquid. For recycling, they could reconstitute the output as new burgers, indistinguishable from what they originally made.
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I've ate there thrice in my life (once in US, twice in Warsaw), and every time the stuff quickly but painfully evacuated itself as a liquid
Weakness disgusts me.
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and every time the stuff quickly but painfully evacuated itself as a liquid.
Have you done an intolerance test for certain ingredients used in fast food? The Burgers aren't good (better than McDonalds), but they don't preclude you from going to a local swimming pool either.
I had a friend who complained about getting "food positioning" from burgers at the same place over and over again (blaming the poor kitchen, blaming the ingredients, blaming preservatives, or whatever). Turns out it was an early indicator of gluten intolerance. He's now been diagnosed with full blown celiac diseas
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I think the Yes Men actually did pitch that very idea to a bunch of Mc Donalds top executives, and were cheered in the process.
Amazing (Score:3)
They've invented the Coke bottle.
Would you really want this? (Score:1)
Would you put your life in the hands of a Burger King employee to wash this so-called re-usable container??
Really? I bet within 30 days there will be videos showing people getting their fish and fries with an unordered side of left over burger.
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Because Denny's is so much more elite than BK? (Score:2)
Would you put your life in the hands of a Burger King employee to wash this so-called re-usable container??
Really? I bet within 30 days there will be videos showing people getting their fish and fries with an unordered side of left over burger.
You're so right...good thing all those people who couldn't get a job at Denny's or your local diner were rejected there, but hired by Burger King.
I worked as a dishwasher in a family restaurant in high school. It's shitty work, but there's not much trust to it. Someone with a shitty job and a shitty life washes the food off and then it's run through a machine to catch their waste and sterilize the dishes. If the washer screws up, he's fired. It's a pretty easy job to replace. You can learn how to do
So will there be a discount (Score:2)
If you bring your own containers ?
Charging the consumer extra when they choose the r (Score:2)
Why would anyone want to pay more just to cut down on the use of wax-coated paper?
This should not be an optional choice, it should be mandatory. The deposit should be in with the price and returning the packaging should reward the person with money off their next meal. To mitigate against risk of environmental damage from those who do not care for their discount, they should make sure the packaging still biodegrades in a reason
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Because if I want to stop for a BK when I'm out and eat it "on the road" I really want to carry the dirty "dishes" around in my car in the summer until I get around to stopping by a BK again in the next few weeks. Of course, I'll also have Carl's Jr, McDs, In-and-Out, etc. packaging with me as well making a bigger mess. I'll have to buy a gas guzzling SUV just to carry the crap around with me. Not.
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So take your own plate and mug in...
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I likely wouldn't patronize a restaurant that allowed customers to bring in their own, maybe clean and maybe not, plate(s) and had staff handle those and then handle my food without extreme hygiene protocols. At a minimum this would include changing of staff member gloves and sterilization of the surfaces (including handles of shared utensils such as "fry scoops" and tongs) that had been touched by the customer's plate(s) or by a staff member after touching a customer(s) plates. This would have to be done b
Maybe (Score:2)
Loop seems to be doing well. The Haagan Dazs ice cream sales in aluminum containers has been going on for a while now. Longer than Quibi, anyway, so it's not a total failure.
Actually I'm a little surprised. I checked ebay and I don't see any of the Haagan Dazs containers up for sale. I'd have thought some lunatic entrepreneur would have put some up by now. Vintage cans like that are a collectible and have been for a long time. Surely a new one would be as well.
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Unfortunately Haagen-Dazs has been completely ruined by Nestle. They took out a bunch of the fat and now it's no better than Ben & Jerry's. I bought a pint recently and it was pathetic.
Reminds me of collecting bottles (Score:1)
Yummy grass (Score:1)
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Tax (Score:1)
Sounds like an excuse for data collection (Score:2)
Don't the burgers come in paper boxes? (Score:1)
Selling used food. (Score:1)
Not that you could tell with the crap turned out by mass market fast food joints.
$5 says people won't get it (Score:2)
nope, no way (Score:2)
If they wash the containers as bad as they wash the trays, ain't no way...besides, I am not going to stand in line again to get my deposit back.
Tokyo? (Score:2)
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There are very few Burger Kings in Tokyo compared to other countries, I'm so surprised to see it in the list for this trial.
Japan is extremely good at recycling. Tokyo was chosen on purpose so the experiment could be branded a success.
Label it (Score:1)
I live near a McDonald's and a Burger King and their packaging is littering the sidewalks and parks in the neighbourhood. Entire empty packaging sets are tossed out of car windows. People are lazy and I seriously doubt if they're going to keep the greasy, smelly packaging and return it at some later point in time.
How about this solution. A scanner reads the license plates of each car that uses the drive-through and prints/labels/laser-engraves the number on all items of the order. Then when packaging gets t
How much energy and harsh chemicals will this use? (Score:1)