Meet the finalists

Community Action of the Year

Building Reuse

Policy

Activist of the Year

Community Awards

This award is intended for community groups, coalitions, student groups, nonprofits, and NGOs working on supporting the buildout of reuse projects and infrastructure in their community. They could be bringing reuse to their localities in all kinds of ways, from escalating reuse in schools, events, airports, academic campuses, sports stadiums, repair and fix-it clinics, and more – including helping build out the infrastructure required in order for reuse policies to be effectively enacted.

  • Reuse Minnesota's purpose is to lead a movement grounded in the principles of reuse, which extends the life of resources and decreases the demand for new production. They build partnerships and support a vibrant network of reuse practitioners through education, promotion, and advocacy. They envision regenerative, reuse-centered communities that protect the environment and value the well-being of future generations.

  • Reuse Seattle brings reusable food and beverage container solutions and services to the city’s institutions, schools/universities, sports and entertainment venues, small and medium-sized restaurants, and all businesses with food service operations. Ultimately, the Reuse Seattle vision is for a network of reuse systems for food and beverage containers in use at Seattle institutions, venues, businesses, and communities to become connected and interoperable through external public space collection systems, leveraging a set of system standards. This will enable these systems to be serviced by shared collection, transportation, washing and digital infrastructures—making reuse systems convenient and accessible across our community.

  • StopWaste’s Reuse & Repair Network brings together businesses and nonprofits involved in reuse, repair and redistribution, to connect, share resources and ideas, form partnerships and support each other in overcoming the barriers this unique and important industry faces. Reuse and repair organizations often don’t have the time and resources to get to know and work with one another, yet collaboration is key to fully realize their critical contributions to a circular local economy. This is where local government agency StopWaste comes in: By facilitating regular networking activities, creating shared resources and fostering a sense of community among members, they help the area’s innovative and hardworking reuse and repair organizations form a strong, resilient and influential industry. Along the way, StopWaste has a unique opportunity to listen and learn about the industry’s trends and needs, enabling the agency to better tailor other offerings and programs in support of reuse and repair.

This award is intended for community groups, coalitions, student groups, nonprofits, and NGOs working on reuse-focused policy initiatives. They could be working to pass policy in their community or at the state/federal level; drafting model policies; designing and implementing awareness campaigns; or otherwise be playing a key role in ensuring passage of reuse policy. Share your group’s policy victories of the year, and the role the group took in ensuring passage of this policy.

Honorable Mentions:

Reusable NYC

City of Edmonton

  • The Town of Banff strives to be a model environmental community, where everything we do is guided by a goal to protect this special place. As a town located in Canada's first national park, with wildlife and sensitive ecosystems surrounding us, reducing landfill waste is a key priority. The Town of Banff has set waste targets of 70% diversion by 2028 and a goal of ultimately sending zero waste to landfill and is working with The Bear Minimum & Banff Isn't Disposable to accomlish these goals.

  • Keep Truckee Green is the Town of Truckee’s sustainability, solid waste, and resiliency program. They coordinate the planning and implementation of their town’s waste reduction and climate change actions. In partnership with the community, they foster culture to proactively address climate change and waste reduction and lead by example. Each year, Town Council sets goals and priorities, and litter and waste reduction have been a top priority for the community. Over the last 5 years, staff has focused on developing policies and programs to reduce waste from the source and create a zero-waste community.

  • The mission of Reusable San Mateo County is to champion the move away from disposable, single-use foodware (clamshells, cups, utensils, etc.) to reusable foodware through policy and on-the-ground solutions. In less than 2 years of work, they have celebrated 5 reuse victories:

    Burlingame: Partnership with City to implement reusable foodware program for take-out (program includes financial support for restaurants)

    Redwood City: City program to promote the use of reusable foodware in restaurants (program includes financial support for restaurants)

    Daly City: Addition of reuse language to foodware ordinance

    Pacifica: Addition of MANDATORY reuse language to fooware ordinance

    HalfMoon Bay: Addition of MANDATORY reuse language to fooware ordinance

This award is intended for the individual changemakers and heroes who are championing reduce, refill and reuse solutions in their communities.

  • Working through the nonprofit trade association he has led for over 20 years, Dan provides hospital management and policy makers with the tools they need to reduce greenhouse emissions, cost, and waste through the safe reuse of "single-use" medical devices.

    Dan's 20+ years of dogged commitment and vision has resulted in hundreds of millions of single-use medical devices being reused. He has created a template for those wanting to start entire reuse industries by advocating for strict regulations globally to level the playing field and keep patients safe; educating EU and US policy makers on well-designed life cycle studies; or speaking with surgeons, nurses, and hospital purchasing agents on the rapid growth of the field.

  • Jennifer leads Zero Waste Hawai’i Island, which is partnered with NO POHŌ, an organization that began a pilot program in October 2022 with a small local business to reuse glass beverage containers. They are now expanding this service to another local business in Hilo. ZWHI helped developing a tracking system for the bottles, worked with DOH to get use of the bottles approved, identified a company to source refillable bottles from, and made connections with local businesses to pilot the program.

    They are also working with as the local partnering organization to implement a city-scale immersive reusable foodware program and are currently planning Community Design Workshops.

    Jennifer and ZWHI are also engaged with policy work at the state level to pass EPR for packaging that prioritizes reduction and reuse. She coordinated a EPR working group for the last two years and also assisted in drafting and amending this year’s bill, HB1326.

  • Most recently, Stephanie has been producing and hosting zero waste events. She also set up a rent-a-mug station at the farmers market, providing free mugs for patrons to borrow while visiting the coffee stands—while also engaging people to join Clean Air Baltimore to put pressure on elected officials to support zero waste programs, policies and infrastructure.

    Stephanie has volunteered as a zero waste expert for 2 events in the city: The Vegan Soulfest and the Vegan Block Party, where she set up 3-bin sorting stations and engaged with those using the station to educate on the incinerator, the city's largest stationary source of air pollution.

    She has also created initiatives and helped coordinate and consult on zero-waste events around the city of Baltimore.

Business Awards

This award is intended for businesses that provide a service that keeps reusables circulating in our economy. Think: a dishwashing service that picks up and returns real dishes to a restaurant, or a to-go coffee cup that is collected for return and reuse by the cafe that provides it. The service provider could also offer a product – like bath and body or cleaning products that are sold in containers meant for refill by the same provider.

The point is, The Reusies® would like to recognize innovative businesses who are taking the reuse burden off of you, the consumer, and making it a seamless part of the circular economy. So while your stainless steel water bottle and leak-proof travel mug are super cool, and the companies making them are doing some great stuff, they're not a fit for this award.

Awards are offered in three sectors this year: Food & Beverage, Consumer Packaged Goods, and Fashion & Apparel.

  • The Boomerang Bottling System offers a sustainable and innovative solution to single-use water bottle waste. Boomerang's closed-loop, semi-automated, high-throughput process bottles 350-400 returnable aluminum and glass bottles per hour, displacing 1 million single-use bottles annually. Boomerang's bottles are washed, sanitized, filtered, filled, and capped with locally sourced water processed through its ultrafiltration technology for chemical and micro-plastic-free hydration. Boomerang eliminates the carbon footprint from shipping bottled water and offers customizable bottles for corporate, industrial, and military campuses, convention centers, hotels, resorts, and cruise lines that choose Boomerang for a greener and more sustainable future.

  • DeliverZero is a full-service reusable packaging solution that eliminates single-use packaging waste. As a neutral network of returnable, reusable takeout containers DeliverZero can integrate with any online ordering platform or point of sale (POS) system. DeliverZero’s ability to integrate directly with ordering systems eliminates the need for additional manual inputs from the merchant (e.g. restaurants, caterers, meal delivery services, etc.) or end user (i.e. the customer ordering food) during the ordering process. DeliverZero makes reuse incredibly easy; the system requires virtually no added effort from merchants and end users to incorporate reusables into daily life.

  • Re:Dish is building the warewashing infrastructure—and the software to manage it—that makes reuse possible at scale. This backend solution supports both the turnkey, enterprise-calibrated reusables program and washing third-party reusable wares, enabling greater participation in the circular economy.

    Re:Dish’s Reusables Program offers dishware-as-a-service, helping foodservice generate less waste and companies meet their ESG goals. Re:Dish delivers and collects reusables (containers, plates, and cups), tracks, cleans and sanitizes them at its industrial washing facility, and then returns the reusables back to the client. With DishTrack, Re:Dish’s inventory and impact dashboard, clients are able to track their inventory levels as well as their landfill waste diversion, carbon emissions savings and water reduction.. Re:Dish services corporate cafeterias and pantries, healthcare facilities, arenas, K-12 schools & universities, production sets—anywhere food is served at scale.

Honorable Mentions: Friendlier

Free Flow Wines

  • Generation Conscious built a zero waste, zero water infrastructure to end hygiene insecurity and create a paradigm shift necessary in U.S. consumer culture, to end billions of tons of waste from landfills and incinerators disproportionately. Their plastic-free refill station distributes accessible, non-toxic, hypoallergenic, biodegradable laundry detergent sheets. By eliminating packaging and water, these dual benefits enable anyone to refill from our infrastructure without a container, eliminating the tote bag problem. Generation Conscious partners with universities, multi-family buildings and commercial real estate developers to install their refill stations inside laundry rooms and bathrooms to meet users at the point when they are doing laundry. They center the voices of those most affected by environmental injustices, by granting equity and paying first-gen low income persons $20/hr to build a zero waste infrastructure in their community.

  • “Returning” as finalist from 2022, Returnity designs, manufactures, and implements reusable shipping and delivery packaging solutions for brands and retailers. They have revolutionized internal logistics shipping with the launch of The Last Box, a cost and labor efficient alternative to cardboard that enables clients to move products between factories, stores and warehouses faster and cheaper while significantly reducing their environmental footprint. The Last Box is on track to displace millions of single-use boxes in 2023; customers use The Last Box to ship products as normal, and then nest the empty boxes for efficient return shipping in bulk. With no special tools or training, The Last Box is a plug-and-play on-ramp to the circular economy.

  • Revolusation is helping build the foundations of the new circular economy by re-engineering single-use products and packaging into reusable versions, and creating the systems needed for circulation.

    From reusable shipping boxes and bags, to multi-use fresh and shelf-stable food packaging, to circular agricultural and pharmaceutical products and packaging, Revolusation's patented reusable product designs and services have proven better than single-use in the areas of cost, impact and user engagement.

    To do this, they use three principles: designs that are ultra-convenient for consumers, business and organizations to use and reuse, taking advantage of pre-existing logics channels, including already present closed-loop models, and incorporate behavior science theory to ensure high user engagement, including adoption and product returns.

Honorable Mention

Bound

  • Alternew is the first online platform that is changing the way we care for our wardrobe. With just a few clicks, customers connect with a specialist that meets their needs and preferences, eliminating the opacity that once surrounded finding reliable businesses in their area.

    In today's fashion industry, finding someone to care for your wardrobe can be a challenge. The process is time-consuming, inconvenient, and unreliable, resulting in a pile of clothing alterations that often sit untouched in the back of your closet. Meanwhile, the fast fashion industry continues to overproduce; 400% from just 20 years ago, and consumers wear clothes half as long. It's clear that we need a solution to make the fashion care process more convenient to promote a repair economy and support the circular economy.

  • The Renewal Workshop (TRW) by Bleckmann identified a need in the market for apparel and textile brands to extend the life of their post-consumer products once considered waste. They created The Renewal System to restore products to standardized conditions so they could be resold, generating new revenue opportunities for brands, reducing the overall pollution brands create from their “waste” streams and enabling the reduction of new production to reduce negative environmental impacts. The Renewal System is the integrated technology, operations and processes that enable Renewal. There are three foundation parts of the system:

    - The Renewal Operating System

    - The Renewal Process

    - Resale enablement

    The system tracks individual products through the renewal process as well as produces data on product faults and quality, how it was restored, and quantifies the positive environmental impact of product life extension.

  • Treet helps fashion brands reduce their footprint and increase customer loyalty through resale. Their platform allows brands of any size to launch a resale experience where their customers can buy and sell their pre-loved items, ensuring each item lives its longest life. By offering multiple paths for customers to resell their items, from peer-to-peer resale to trade-in, Treet opens the door for the highest volume of items to be resold.

    On any Treet-powered resale site, customers can list items for sale or trade-in directly from their order history or the brand catalog – all in just a few clicks. Treet manages the entire experience on behalf of our brands to ensure items are received and verified by the buyer.

    Brands have the best data on who’s purchased their items in the past, making them the best source to encourage customers to resell their items when the time comes. Their goal is to make secondhand feel firsthand for brands and their customers around the world.