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Plastic bottles await recycling at a plant in London. Meanwhile, in Berkeley, California, Jessica Carroll at Gu Energy wanted to find a way to reuse her company’s non-recyclable products.
Plastic bottles await recycling at a plant in London. Meanwhile, in Berkeley, California, Jessica Carroll at Gu Energy wanted to find a way to reuse her company’s non-recyclable products. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Plastic bottles await recycling at a plant in London. Meanwhile, in Berkeley, California, Jessica Carroll at Gu Energy wanted to find a way to reuse her company’s non-recyclable products. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

The long journey towards keeping Gu Energy packaging out of landfills

This article is more than 8 years old
Jessica Carroll

In a perfect world, all packages would be fully recyclable. In reality, it can be harder than expected to turn packaging into something valuable for reuse

We all know the maxim “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”, but what happens when an item doesn’t fit into one of these categories? It becomes the “R” people don’t like to talk as much about: rubbish.

Jessica Carroll, an executive assistant at Gu Energy, took it upon herself to find a way to reuse the company’s packaging – and helped move it along a path towards recyclability. Photograph: Gu Energy/Paul Gower

In my personal life, I reduce, reuse, and recycle as much as I can, but there still aren’t solutions for all of the waste I make. Trash bugs me so much that I removed the trash bin from my house. I now have to walk outside to the communal dumpster if I want to throw something out. I buy most of my groceries in bulk and try to avoid packaged foods. No matter how much I embrace the three Rs, there has always been one major exception: the products of the company I work for, Gu Energy.

My job as executive assistant at Gu does not directly relate to sustainability. But because I believe in Gu’s core value of longevity – the idea of making decisions that are right for the long term – I have made sustainability work a big part of my job.

One of the best parts of my job is the ability to help the company make a change. While Gu shows its commitment to sustainability in many ways – employees volunteer to clean up hiking trails; the company just reformulated its products to be vegan; and our president, Tal Johnson, regularly picks up litter on his bike rides – our core product is an energy gel, delivered in a flex-package film that is not recyclable.

About a year ago, Johnson told me about TerraCycle, a New Jersey-based company that turns post-consumer trash into functional items, giving them a second life. TerraCycle partners with companies to bring in more trash, charging each company a fee for the recycling, while enabling consumers send empty packaging to TerraCycle for free.

Some programs even offer consumers an incentive of a few pennies for each package collected. This may not seem like a lot, but if you’re collecting Gu gels with your cycling team, this can add up to hundreds of dollars over the course of a year.

When Johnson asked me if I wanted to research a potential partnership, he jokingly added the caveat that I was not allowed to quit to go work at TerraCycle.

I have upcycled some of our scrap packaging for decorations at office parties and the like, but that’s just a drop in the bucket, and it will still eventually end up in the landfill. TerraCycle’s approach seemed similar to what I had been doing internally, but on a much larger scale, with a longer lasting solution. So I got in touch to learn how TerraCycle could help Gu turn its packaging into park benches, trash cans, folding chairs and more, while also diverting waste from landfills. I was determined to find a way to make this partnership work.

First, however, TerraCycle had to make sure it could make our packaging film work with its recycling program, and asked me for our film specs as well as a sample of film. We were not able to release the exact composition of our package, but after explaining the program to our regulatory team, I got approval to send a piece of film, which was sufficient for TerraCycle’s analysis. A few weeks later, I was thrilled to hear it would have no problem upcycling the material. Success! Soon there would be no more Gu packets in landfills, or so I thought.

A journey of a thousand steps

It turns out that the cost to implement this program was beyond Gu’s budget capacity. I needed to find a way to lower the cost. Should we collect fewer packets? Wait until next year when we could budget more? Only allow collection for certain events or customers? None of these answers felt right. I wanted everyone who touched a Gu packet to have the opportunity to give it a second life. In the end, the best solution I found was to alter the consumer incentive. In addition to free shipping, GU had planned to pay $0.02 for every packet sent to TerraCycle. If we lowered this to $0.01, we could cut our costs, and we could always increase the incentive down the road. We also worked out a reduced cost by signing a multi-year contract with TerraCycle.

Once we got the costs to line up with our budget, the next challenge we faced was getting our consumers to help us take full advantage of this opportunity. People were excited to hear about the partnership, but participation has taken some time to catch on. And I’ll admit: even I have to stop myself from throwing my packet in the trash on a run. Changing a habit isn’t easy for anyone. So far this year we have collected over 20,000 packets – which is a great start, but only a fraction of what we manufacture each day.

Using our existing partnerships is one route we’re taking. Working with race directors offers a great opportunity to collect packets that athletes consume on the course. But not all race directors have been willing to have separate collection bins, and separating Gu packaging from the trash is more work than most can take on. We’re considering including a TerraCycle bin as a mandatory part of our event contracts, which would help us work toward our goal of zero-waste events.

Getting bins into retail spaces where consumers buy Gu is also a challenge. For this to be most effective, retailers must commit to educating their customers about the recycling option, which can be a big time investment. To overcome this, I am working with Gu’s vice president of sales to create a plan that incentivizes sales reps to encourage recycling in the stores in their territory.

I would love to see us grow this program to take in every package we manufacture, partnering with more organizations and expanding internationally. And yet my true hope is that we won’t even need a TerraCycle partnership in the future.

It is a great solution for where Gu is at the moment, but reusing and reducing are more sustainable options, and we’re moving in that direction. This fall, Gu will introduce a bulk-sized gel with a reusable flask. We also have been working on biodegradable packaging, and are eager to perfect that and bring it to market.

From my experience, companies are excited to incorporate sustainability into their business. Often it just takes someone pointing out a problem and working towards a solution. But as my story shows, it also helps to prepare for a long journey.

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