Visitors to the Phoenix Convention Center may soon notice a difference in their drink cups.
The Convention Center is working with Portland, Oregon-based Bold Reuse, a company that partners with Pepsi and other brands to reduce waste through reuse packaging.
Company CEO Jocelyn Quarrell said reusing has better benefits than recycling.
"Recycling or compostable packaging, those are downstream solutions to waste management, so they require a lot of additional effort and energy to turn a product into something else,” she said. “The benefit in reuse is that you're not having to continuously allocate new resources to make new things that are only used for a very short period of time before they're disposed of and thrown away."
Quarrell’s company handles washing and sanitizing reusable packaging, which is often plastic that can eventually be recycled.
“It’s frankly a better drinking experience to have a beverage out of a durable, reusable product,” she said.
Quarrel said the reusable cups should be delivered to the convention center in the next few weeks and each cup can be reused hundreds of times.
“That cup is going to state on it really clearly, this cup is meant for reuse, so please return it to a reuse bin. At the end of the event, we'll collect all those cups. We'll wash and sanitize it and then we'll deliver it back to the convention center, so that cup can be reused again and again and again,” she said.
The company’s website describes its containers as being among the safest plastic choices, similar to yogurt cups and baby bottles.
