Global Green USA Seeks Quick Service Restaurants to Participate in a New York City Recycling Pilot to Inform the Design of National Recycling Solutions

Pilot Program Features Pret A Manger as Lead Participant

CleanRiver to Donate Up to 150 Recycling Bins to Facilitate Pilot

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Global Green USA is seeking quickservice restaurants looking to be greener to participate in a 150-store pilot in New York City. The pilot project will inform the design of a cost-effective, national recycling solution for foodservice packaging.

“We are very excited to continue our involvement”

Every year, 4.1 million tons of paper, prepared food packaging is landfilled in the United States.¹ The collection and recycling of this material would decrease greenhouse gas emissions by ~15 million metric tons of CO2, the equivalent of removing 3 million passenger vehicles from the road.² The 150-store pilot will build upon the findings of previous pilot programs conducted in partnership with Starbucks Coffee Company, Pret A Manger and other members of its Coalition for Resource Recovery.

Pret A Manger, an international quick-service restaurant chain with over 265 store locations globally, announced that 25 of its New York City stores will participate in the expanded program slated to launch this fall. “We are very excited to continue our involvement,” said Chris Gwilliam, Pret a Manger’s Director of Operational Projects; “Pret is committed to reducing as much waste to landfill as we can and we are proud to contribute to Global Green’s research and the greater goals of finding an industry wide solution while achieving our own waste reduction goals.”

CleanRiver™, a company focused on building recycling containers and programs, and who have developed systems for Tim Horton’s and Pret A Manger, have offered to donate 150 containers for in-store use for Global Green’s pilot program. The new recycling containers provide the flexibility to expand from one to four streams (as a result of a unique, patent-pending design approach), and utilize 4-color customizable label/poster messaging options, to support optimal customer pre-sort. “We’re delighted to be a part of this project and to learn through the pilot process how we can optimize messaging and multi-stream container design by assisting a diversity of quick service retail environments,” said Tom Lembo, CleanRiver’s™ Recycling Program Manager. “Each participating brand will be offered up to 30 containers as a means of facilitating Global Green reaching a diversity of retail environments for participation in the pilot.”

Participation of 150 or more quick service restaurants will generate the post-consumer paper packaging material needed for mill, collection, and sorting tests, thereby creating demand for the material and informing the design of a cost-effective, national recycling solution for foodservice packaging.

Information on how to participate can be found at: http://www.thecorr.org/pilotrestaurantguide.pdf

¹ US EPA. 2009. MSW Facts and Figures. Paper plates and cups, bags and sacks, and folding carton discards used to derive tons landfilled.
² EPA’s WARM Tool and Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator used to derive potential greenhouse gas savings and equivalent cars off the road.