Ottawa Bets on Reuse: Inside a City-Scale Experiment in Packaging

A new pilot announced this month is testing something the packaging industry has talked about for years but rarely attempted at scale: what happens when an entire city's worth of retailers, brands, and consumers switch a slice of everyday shopping to reusable packaging. The Consumer Goods Forum's Plastic Waste Coalition of Action, working with UK-based reuse specialist Reposit, is launching The Reuse City Canada Project in Ottawa, expected to go live in the third quarter of 2026.

The roster of participants is notable for its size and its mix of competitors. Loblaws, Real Canadian Superstore, Shoppers Drug Mart, Your Independent Grocer, and Walmart Canada will sit alongside brand owners L'Oréal, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever, with packaging and labeling partners Amcor and Avery Dennison, and Canadian circular economy specialists Circulr and IBM rounding out the coalition. That breadth is the point. Reuse systems tend to fail when they're confined to a single retailer or a single brand's product line, because the friction of remembering which container goes back to which store defeats the convenience that makes reuse viable in the first place.

The mechanics are deliberately simple. Shoppers will be able to buy selected personal care and home care products in durable, reusable packaging at participating Ottawa stores, backed by a small refundable deposit. Once empty, the packaging goes back at designated in-store return points, where Reposit's operation collects it, cleans it professionally, and returns it to circulation. The project is also building shared reverse-logistics infrastructure and bilingual return messaging, since Ottawa spans English and French speaking communities, a detail that hints at how much unglamorous operational design goes into making reuse feel effortless to a shopper.

Funding comes in part from the Government of Canada and Handelens Miljøfond, the Norwegian Retailers' Environment Fund, with support from the Canada Plastics Pact. Cédric Dever, Director of the Consumer Goods Forum's Plastic Waste Coalition of Action, called Ottawa "an exciting breakthrough in collective action," arguing that the project shows how "retailers, manufacturers, and system enablers can align efforts to deliver reuse at city scale," and that the resulting data could offer "a scalable blueprint for other markets worldwide." Reposit founder and CEO Stuart Chidley was blunter about the stakes, noting that shifting from single-use to reuse "demands collective action and systemic change across the entire value chain," and framing the goal as a circular system "where packaging keeps its value, resources stay in use, and waste becomes a thing of the past." Canada's Minister of Environment, Climate Change and Nature, Julie Dabrusin, tied the pilot to broader policy goals, saying durable, reusable packaging can "drastically cut plastic waste, pollution and material use" while creating new economic opportunities.

The timing is not incidental. The EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation became applicable across member states this month after an 18-month implementation runway, and a growing list of US states have passed their own extended producer responsibility laws for packaging. Regulators are pushing harder, and the sustainable packaging market itself is projected to grow at a mid-to-high single digit clip through the end of the decade. Reuse pilots have popped up before in single cafés and single cities' takeout programs, but a coordinated, multi-brand, multi-retailer system is a different order of complexity, and a genuine test of whether reuse can move from novelty to infrastructure.

What happens next matters less for Ottawa itself than for what the project is designed to produce: credible, shareable data on cost, consumer behavior, and logistics that the Consumer Goods Forum plans to pass along to industry and policy stakeholders elsewhere. If it works, the blueprint won't stay in Canada for long.

Source: "CGF Plastic Waste Coalition to Pilot City-Scale Reusable Packaging System in Ottawa with Reposit," The Consumer Goods Forum, theconsumergoodsforum.com