Solving Colorado’s atrocious 16% recycling rate is not solely on the shoulders of Chook Chicken restaurant CEO Elizabeth Nicholson.
But her roast chicken haven is one of the few places where Colorado consumers are trying new ways to pluck cardboard and plastic out of the 5.6 pounds of waste each person generates every day.
Chook’s multiple locations in metro Denver have adopted a reusable plastic takeout container from Deliver Zero. Customers who ask for the service pay an extra 99 cents, as if reusables were a menu item like a side of mashed potatoes. The customer has up to three weeks to drop off their used containers or face a $3 charge.
One of the plastic containers can be reused 1,000 times after being picked up and washed at Deliver Zero.
“Selfishly for us,” Nicholson said, “it’s a good marketing tool, because when they drop off here, they smell the chicken cooking and buy more.”
Colorado recycling leaders releasing the annual State of Recycling report last week chose to highlight small victories like Chook’s washable takeout boxes. And they were up front about the reasons why. Despite many Colorado residents’ green-tinged self-image, the state has been stuck at taking only 16% of materials out of the waste stream each year, for the full seven years of the report. That’s half the national average of 32% recycling, composting and reuse in municipal waste.
The holiday season is traditionally a peak time for household and food waste, with gift packaging, takeout containers and home food packaging for guests, and party leftovers.
The report’s authors went with a theme this year of, “Sure it’s awful, but things are looking up.”
Long term, report authors Eco-Cycle and CoPIRG said, state and local governments have released a flock of recycling laws that should start improving Colorado recycling rates by at least 2026.
They noted a number of state and local policy changes that could have a big impact:
- A 2022 state law setting up a producer responsibility board, with the power to tax packaging-makers and use the proceeds to pay for universal curbside recycling across Colorado. The program is meant to fill in gaps for towns without recycling, and to create a more robust industrial market for accepting recycled materials and reworking them into new packaging.
- Denver voters passed mandatory recycling for previously neglected multifamily apartments. With hundreds of thousands of renters, the Denver change should boost local recycling rates among residents with improved access.
- New state laws restricting use of plastic grocery bags, which cannot be recycled and also gum up recycling sorting machinery and taint compost streams, kick in Jan. 1. The Colorado Plastic Pollution Reduction Act first imposed the present 10-cent bag fee at retail stores, then set up the complete ban for 2024. The act also bans restaurants’ use of Styrofoam takeout containers on Jan. 1
In the meantime, recycling advocates are hoping for smaller efforts like Chook’s to take flight.
CoPIRG’s Danny Katz also cited innovations in waste reduction such as a Breckenridge hotel removing single-use shampoo bottles in favor of fixed, refillable containers. Breckenridge Grand Vacations took a half-million plastic bottles out of the waste stream in a year, and lowered their costs 40%, Katz said.
The best way to reduce garbage is “to not produce waste in the first place,” Katz said. Consumers and recycling sorters remain frustrated over properly separating what has real commodity value for reuse from materials that either damage sorters or contaminate valuable batches of compost.
Advocates call it a “circular economy,” meaning there are both ways to collect and sort recyclables containing valuable materials, and a healthy industry of companies making new packaging from what consumers are returning.
“Recycling and composting alone are not enough, we need to build that circular economy,” said Suzanne Jones, manager of philanthropy for Eco-Cycle. “We see significant headway being made.” Colorado will be the first noncoastal state to have a ban on both plastic bags and Styrofoam food containers, Jones said.
Chook is among the first restaurants to “dive in” to the reusable containers, said Deliver Zero’s Chris Todd. The trick is to make the pickup, wash and return system “inherently easy” for everyone, he said.
Some restaurateurs are still recovering from the blows of pandemic closures and the ongoing tight labor market, Todd said, making them reluctant to embrace more change. One selling point Deliver Zero offers is that their statistics show the customers opting for reusables tend to spend more than average.
The restaurant pays about 25 cents per container, Todd said. Deliver Zero has given customers a break on the time period for returns while it introduces the idea. The return rate has been 95 to 98%, “way above where we needed to be,” Todd said. “A nice surprise.”
One of the next challenges is getting more involvement from third-party delivery services like Grubhub, DoorDash or UberEats, advocates say. They could help with pickups and returns, for example. Chook estimates up to 20% of its orders go through delivery services.
A small percentage of Chook customers pick the reusable container fee so far, Nicholson said, but it’s building, and reception has been good.
“We knew it was going to be early adopters at first,” she said. “It’s too early to tell if we can give up throwaway containers.”
