The return of the milk bottle

Could the milk bottle model make a comeback?

For much of the last half-century, the deal with packaging has been rather consistent: companies sell consumers products in containers designed to be used once and consumers are responsible for figuring out what happens next. Rinse it and reuse it or put it in the proper bin.

Now, a growing crop of Canadian reuse programs is testing a different proposition by asking, what if the package never belongs to the consumer in the first place? What if mainstream businesses directly supply durable containers that are borrowed, returned, professionally washed and put back into circulation?

It’s similar to the milkman of yore, who’d drop fresh bottles of milk off on your porch while also collecting your empties for reuse.

In 2024, the Circular Innovation Council launched Reuse Ottawa with Sobeys and Farm Boy, Metro, Walmart Canada and a collection of logistics and service companies. Instead of each retailer operating its own system, the companies joined one shared network: customers could borrow reusable food containers without an upfront deposit that are tracked digitally, dropped at participating return locations, professionally washed and redistributed.

The collaboration is the key. Earlier reusable container experiments tended to be small and brand-specific, says Shannon Lavalley, reuse program director at the Circular Innovation Council. But a container that can only be returned to one store is far less useful than one circulating through a network.

“What we wanted to trial was, can we get [companies] to work together to have a unified system?” Ms. Lavalley says. That meant figuring out “who’s going to pick up the containers, who’s going to wash them, who’s going to move them around?”

Reuse Ottawa tried to answer those questions collectively. One of its washing partners, Gate Gourmet, already serviced Ottawa’s airport and had commercial dishwashing capacity sitting largely unused. Organizers similarly looked to existing delivery routes rather than build a transportation network from scratch.

It’s an unglamorous glimpse at what a circular economy actually requires: washing capacity, trucking routes, inventory management, return bins and agreements between companies that ordinarily compete for your grocery budget.

“Going the boutique approach alone in a geography like Canada’s isn’t feasible,” says Jo-Anne St. Godard, executive director of the Circular Innovation Council. Her organization’s role, she says, was to give competitors a neutral place to collaborate. “Our secret sauce is a platform to allow these companies to work together in a pre-competitive way.”

Plus, the “de-risking” of it all made it even more tempting. Ms. St. Godard says, “We came in as the independent, non‑threatening organization that [could] say, ‘Hey, we can convene you guys. You pay into our organization to trial this and we’ll organize it all for you.’ They could invest a little bit of money in a catchment area in one city, trialing in one, two, maybe three stores. That gave them a real‑world, low‑risk, low‑cost, no‑binding [pilot].”

The good news? Reuse Ottawa has found that people do, in fact, bring the containers back.

The program avoided charging an upfront deposit partly because organizers didn’t want another charge added to grocery bills during a cost-of-living crisis. Customers instead had a set period to return the container for free and could be charged if it never came back.

Ms. St. Godard says organizers initially budgeted for plenty of containers to disappear into cupboards, garages and car trunks. Instead, she says, the pilot recorded an “incredibly high return rate.”

It flips the common narrative about sustainability that puts the onus on the consumer. Return systems still require participation, but they shift more of the complicated work onto the companies producing, transporting and selling the packaging.

In 2022, Canadians discarded roughly 5.15 million tonnes of plastic, according to Statistics Canada. Packaging accounted for 41.9 per cent of that waste. While about 1.1 million tonnes were sent for material recovery, nearly four million tonnes were directly disposed of. Reuse attempts to intervene before an item becomes waste at all.

It is important to think about those nationwide stats as Ottawa is now becoming a testing ground for an even bigger version of the idea. The Reuse City Canada Project, developed by the Consumer Goods Forum and operated by reuse company Reposit, is intended to take returnable packaging beyond prepared food and into the aisles where Canadians buy shampoo, detergent and other household products.

The program brings together companies including Loblaws, Walmart Canada, Shoppers Drug Mart, L’Oréal, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Consumers will purchase selected personal-care and home-care products in durable packaging with a small refundable deposit, then return the empty package to designated locations to be collected, cleaned and used again.

Unlike Reuse Ottawa, which deliberately tested a system with no upfront deposit, the Reposit program is deposit-based. But the underlying bet is much the same – make reuse more appealing by ensuring consumers don’t have to navigate a separate system for every individual brand.

Of course, that doesn’t automatically make every reusable package greener. Durable containers require more material to manufacture, while collection, transportation and washing consume energy and water. Their environmental advantage depends on getting each package back enough times. A 2024 life-cycle study of reusable plastic takeaway containers found that a centrally collected and washed container had a lower global-warming impact than a comparable single-use package after about six uses. Other studies have produced higher break-even points depending on material, washing and transportation.

In other words, high return rates are more than a consumer engagement metric; they’re fundamental to ensure the environmental math works.

So, who pays for all this? For now, taxpayers, companies and customers. Federal funding records show the Circular Innovation Council received $305,000 for a series of reuse pilots running from 2023 through 2025, while the federal government has separately committed $250,000 to the Reposit project in Ottawa. Participating companies have also contributed, and when it comes to deposit-based systems, customers temporarily put up money they get back when the package is returned.

But while pilots can survive on grants, permanent systems need economics that work without them. Part of the challenge is that disposable packaging can appear deceptively cheap because its price doesn’t include all the costs of dealing with it once it’s thrown away.

“We have to change the way that the market prices plastics,” Ms. St. Godard says.