When discussing reuse, people are quick to address the positive environmental impacts, ocean plastics reduction, and governmental alliances. While all of these are vitally important to the industries success, sometimes the user perspective is lost. Here, I talk through some dos and don’ts for user design and engagement. It’s not rocket science, but it can be easy to forget!

Do….

Get specific. (LOVE is in the air!)

Pick a user group and focus on them. Our near term focus is on “corporate greenies”, a group with good spending power and, with a little help, a growing interest in a move towards sustainability. Make one user group LOVE your product and then move on.

“Make one user group LOVE your product.”

Be local.

Respect that people behave differently everywhere — how they eat, how they pay, the list goes on. You need to work to incorporate this localization while being pragmatic with how you can scale your technology and operations globally. At Muuse we are expanding into both Singapore and Indonesia, geographically close but culturally different, we work strategically with local partners to carve out a relevant offering for both markets.

Give rewards.

This can come in many forms: social gamification, status, posts, discounts etc. We have encouraged our partners to give discounts on all Muuse drinks, and early feedback from the user is that this is a big plus. With our proposed subscription of $3/month, a user can get an ROI in 6 coffees while feeling good about it. What’s not to love!

Don’t….

Be a preacher.

It’s about creating a positive, not negative association with your solution and brand. Most people know about the plastic problem, they don’t need to be reminded of it every second. Consumers want to be associated with something cool, fun, and sustainable. Normally in this order. Muuse has achieved that with an aspirational brand and a focus on technology. This drives trust and creates brand loyalty among our target group.

“It’s about creating a positive, not a negative association with your solution and brand.”

Forget you are solving a user need, not just an environmental one.

This is a very common issue that I think social orientated start-ups have. When asked what problem they are solving they often reply “we are reducing the amount of single-use packaging”. Yes, we are absolutely doing that and it’s something to be proud of but that is not the primary concern for all users. For some, the environmental need is an essential one, for others, it is not. Always keep this in mind when designing your system or assessing the viability of your solution.

Forget about your partners.

In a reuse system (or any system), you are nothing without your partners. In reuse these partners are broadly users, governments, and businesses — don’t forget about these last two. The relationship that we have built with certain cafes and governments have been absolutely vital to our early developments. They become your ambassadors, knowledge partners, and marketers and without them you are nothing, keep them close — you can’t do it alone.

And finally, don’t overcomplicate. Stay lean and learn, trying to incorporate tech into a system that works well can be tough. At Muuse, we believe tech is essential to inventory management, an elevated experience, and tracking your environmental impact but there’s no denying it can add a few steps to the user journey. Keep these steps to a minimum, users want this solution to work so make it as easy as possible for them to be a part of it!

Reuse is coming, be ready! was originally published in Muuse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re almost 50 days into Singapore’s Circuit Breaker restrictions and like the rest of the world on lockdown, we’re taking this time for self-care and working on self-improvement.

Tvarita Shivakumar from the Muuse team tries out the #dalgonacoffee trend to see if it lives up to its hype.

It took around 15 minutes of non-stop whisking to make these fluffy pillows, proving that the time to value scale may have reduced the ROI for enjoyment. Nonetheless, a great final product.

Even better that it was in a Muuse reusable cup 😉.

LOVE COFFEE, HATE WASTE.

We Made Dalgona Coffee was originally published in Muuse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

So you want to start a business in the Reuse space?

Firstly, thank you! It’s an inherently beautiful concept that will require re-behavior change, ‘re’ because this is what we used to do, and it is in need of all the hands and hearts that can support and encourage it.

Almost two years ago today, I was on a plane from Shanghai to Hong Kong and pondering the tremendous global concern that was growing around plastics and the dreadful impacts they are having on our global ecosystem. For a few months, I had been noticing this fervor of concern sweeping across countries and communities and from my thirteen years in renewable energy, I knew that this concern was quickly going to translate into global action. It was in the midst of this when the realization hit me that we could just reuse the same to-go cups, to-go bottles, and to-go packaging, much like we already do in restaurants. Going a step further, I noted that with the rise of delivery services, the logistics were already there, and what was missing was coordination. Three days later and captivated by the idea, I knew my life was being energized towards a new mission.

What follows is what I have learned about reuse and my guide to others who find themselves passionate about this cause and want to proceed.

A warning: running a reuse project, whether in a city, at a campus, at a festival, in an airport, or at a mall requires a lot of work for what still remains minimal financial value, although I believe this will be a short-term reality.

My advice, go for it.

Routes to take

I believe one can summarize a reusable cup or container share program by five main variables, and four decision points that any team will make. The first is to use technology or not. Next, centralized washing or distributed washing. Third, plastic or stainless steel. Fourth, if technology, QR codes or RFID. And fifth, to charge the consumer or charge the cafe, or both. I will detail the pros and cons of each as I see them and as we have thought through them.

Analogue

In my opinion, the most successful reuse program running currently is pioneered by our friends Fabian and Florian and the Recup team. Last I heard, they are in 5,200 cafes across Germany, and they have proven a sustainable business model that supports a growing team. They are a wonderful example of keeping it simple with a non-tech solution. Cafes pay a subscription service, and the cups are 1 euro each to be exchanged at cafes. The beautiful thing about this approach is that there are very few barriers to entry for a new customer to check out a cup, just 1 euro. Now on the other side, a technology approach, whether QR or RFID, allows lots of wonderful data around cup statistics, age of cups, inventory at cafes, and overall usage data. It will require a customer to either download your app first or log in through your web-based platform. Some great examples of technology solutions are CupClub, Vessel, Green Caffeine, and Coffee Collective. We, at Muuse, are believers in technology.

Washing

The next big decision is whether to encourage and incentivize the cafes to wash the cups and containers, or whether to take on the cleaning in a centralized washing facility. This is a tricky one, of course, and especially in the time of coronavirus, there is a desire to ensure that each and every cup is washed by the same exact standards. Also, fast-casual coffee chains are not used to washing much more than their coffee prepping equipment, so some behavior changes will need to be in order. However, this requires serious and consistent work that currently challenges the slim economics of a reuse program. Remember that we are replacing what is a $0.07–$0.15 cent single-use coffee cup.

The other approach is to have the cafes wash the cups that are returned to them. Cafes are expected to clean and sanitize the cups as per dine-in restaurant standards here, and not all outlets will have the capabilities to do so.

At Muuse, we started with a centralized wash model (and even built our own washing facility) and transitioned to a distributed wash model. In the future, we see a hybrid of the two being the most sustainable, and in our modeling, significant scale will be required to support the centralized washing costs.

Material

Next, the sharks and the jets question, plastic or stainless steel (or aluminium, or glass). Oh boy, how the world is interconnected and complicated. The gut reaction by many, and especially right now, is to not use plastic at all costs. It’s in our rivers, oceans, landfills, and it’s going to be in these places for the next 400+ years.

Stainless steel is more likely to be recycled over plastic, though it is actively mined in some not so desirable ways and places and requires a fairly significant amount of energy in production. It’s also significantly more expensive to produce and results in a heavier product, which also increases shipping costs. I, personally, am not anti-plastic and recognize that it’s everywhere in our lives. Yes, single-use plastics are an easy and absolutely critical one for us all to move beyond as quickly as possible, and at the same time, I am still thankful for the plastic bumper on my car, or the plastic keys I am now typing on. I hope we get a lot better at recycling and managing our waste streams, and it’s shocking when one learns of the amount of plastic that leak into the ocean each year — an estimation of 8 million tonnes¹ — which is equivalent to dumping the contents of one garbage truck into the ocean per minute.

In my perspective, both stainless steel and plastic are a good choice. Plastic wins on the cost, on the weight, and on the stackability. Stainless-steel wins on the drinking experience and the longer lifetime resiliency. Stainless will mean a higher deposit for the cup which adds a bit of friction to the first-time consumer and also a higher up-front cost for the team running the program.

As for the other promising materials like rice husk, bamboo fiber, and spent coffee ground mixes, we discovered that they are all bound and composed of plastics and resins and are actually harder to recycle than polypropylene.

Full disclosure on our journey, we intended stainless steel right away, went through a phase of borosilicate, and transitioned back to stainless steel. We have considered using plastic on a number of occasions and I am sure we will continue to debate and consider it moving forward.

Technology

For the technology-focused groups, there is another dividing line. QR (quick response) or RFID (radio frequency identification). For some quick context, QR codes are those funny things you scan with your phone and RFID is what you increasingly are given at concerts and events to pay for your food and drinks. And unbeknownst to a lot of us, RFID is starting to be implemented in so many things from food packaging to clothing to just about every logistics operation. The benefit of QR is that it requires very little additional equipment to set up as they can be interacted with by anyone with a mobile phone. RFID on the other hand, requires specialized readers and a rfid chip that’s implemented in the to-go cup or container.

A beautiful example of this is the CupClub system, pioneered by the talented designer Safia Qureshi. Her thoughtfully designed polypropylene cup and lid are embedded with UHF RFID chips and her four years of hard work and dedication to reusables are evident throughout the CupClub offering.

On this topic, we are pursuing both. Our current system is running on QRs which we love for simplicity, and we love RFID for the seamless tracking and ease of return. Our first technology-focused pilot was at the Tuck Business School where we built our own RFID readers and we are currently expanding our programs in SF and Singapore with QR technology. We believe our future system will allow both and that certain applications will warrant RFID and whereas others will work best with QR. It’s worth noting that we also ran a non-tech system for one year in Bali, Indonesia, the home of our first pilot and project.

Who Pays

For this final topic, we consider who pays for the reusable service, the cafe, the consumer, or both (or neither). The logical starting point for this one is to consider who is paying for the single-use cups today, and the answer here is the cafes — roughly $0.07-$0.25 depending on the quality of the single-use cup; low end for unrecyclable polystyrene and high end for compostable plastics. With this in mind, a team can charge the cafes somewhere between this range for each use of the reusable cup.

Another strategy is to have the consumer pay through a monthly subscription fee that is justified by discounts offered from the cafes for use of a reusable cup. A further consideration here is whether the cafe will be doing the washing, and how to compensate for this work. We started as a team charging the cafes roughly a $0.15 usage fee for the cups and we have transitioned to a consumer subscription model with the cafes doing the cleaning.

With this model, consumers can realize their subscription fee back after just 12 uses, with the cafes offering a $0.25 discount for taking their beverage in a Muuse cup.

A key point is that there is value for both the cafes and the consumers as the network grows. For the consumers, this is added convenience when picking up and dropping off a Muuse cup, and for the cafes, access to a larger community of Muusers who are visiting their cafes to both pick up and drop off cups.

Another driver a team will want to consider is whether the city, school, mall, or office complex they are running the reuse program with will act as a sponsor and help cover the costs of the cups and the ongoing service. A reminder, the economics of these projects are currently thin and the work required to run them properly is considerable.

Join the movement

So to conclude, you are amazing for wanting to help shepherd this concept into the world and we all need your help. After studying and learning more about the promises of recycling and the promises of new biomaterials, my simple take away is that reuse needs to happen if we are going to address the tremendous challenges we have placed on our global ecosystem. As we transition towards this more sustainable future, it is time to leave behind the linear models that brought us here and embrace the circular thinking that will allow future generations to enjoy, experience, and thrive on this beautiful planet.

We at Muuse are here to find solutions to help push this movement further, and please reach out if we can help.

Onwards.

¹J. R. Jambeck et al., Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean (Science, 13 February 2015).

www.muuse.io

My lessons in REUSE was originally published in Muuse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.