Ottawa Bets on the Reusable Bottle

Most reusable packaging pilots live in a single café, a single store, a single neighborhood pop-up. The Reuse City Canada Project, announced this month by the Consumer Goods Forum's Plastic Waste Coalition of Action, is trying something considerably harder: making reuse work across an entire city, spanning multiple retailers and brands that don't normally share infrastructure.

The project is expected to launch in Ottawa in the third quarter of 2026, built in partnership with Reposit, a reuse-systems company serving as delivery partner responsible for system design, build, and day-to-day operations. The participant list reads like a grocery aisle: Loblaws, Real Canadian Superstore, Your Independent Grocer, and Shoppers Drug Mart on the retail side, with L'Oréal, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and Walmart Canada among the brands putting products into the system. Amcor and Avery Dennison are supporting as solution providers, alongside Canadian circular economy partners Circulr and IBM.

The mechanics are meant to feel unremarkable to the shopper. Someone buys a personal care or home care product in a durable, reusable container, paying a small refundable deposit at checkout. When the product runs out, the empty container goes back to any participating store's designated return point — not necessarily the one where it was purchased. From there it enters a shared reverse-logistics loop: collection, professional washing, and return to circulation, with standardized bilingual return messaging designed to keep the experience consistent no matter which retailer or brand a shopper is dealing with.

That cross-retailer, cross-brand consistency is the part worth paying attention to. Most reuse systems to date have been closed loops — a brand's own refill program, a single chain's container-return scheme. Reuse City Canada is explicitly testing shared infrastructure: one set of return points, one washing and logistics backbone, one set of expectations, serving competing companies at once. “Transitioning from single-use to reuse requires more than good intentions — it demands collective action and systemic change across the entire value chain,” said Stuart Chidley, founder and CEO of Reposit. “This is an important step toward building a circular system that works at scale — one where packaging keeps its value, resources stay in use, and waste becomes a thing of the past.”

Cédric Dever, director of the Consumer Goods Forum's Plastic Waste Coalition of Action, framed Ottawa as a proof point rather than an endpoint: “This project shows how retailers, manufacturers, and system enablers can align efforts to deliver reuse at city scale. Through these kinds of partnerships, we can create credible evidence of what works and provide a scalable blueprint for other markets worldwide.” The project is funded in part by the Government of Canada and Handelens Miljøfond, the Norwegian Retailers' Environment Fund, with support from the Canada Plastics Pact. Canada's Minister of Environment, Climate Change and Nature, Julie Dabrusin, called it an example of “governments, businesses, non-profit organizations and communities working together to create new economic opportunities and sustainable choices for Canadians.”

The timing is notable. The European Union's own Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation became binding across member states this same month, tightening recyclability design rules and substance restrictions continent-wide. Between tightening regulation abroad and voluntary infrastructure experiments like Ottawa's, packaging companies are getting squeezed from both directions to move past the assumption that single-use is simply how things are done. Reuse isn't positioned to replace recycling here — the project's organizers are explicit that reuse and recycling are meant to complement each other, with reuse taking on the products best suited to durable packaging while recycling continues to handle the rest.

Consumer-facing details, including which products and store locations will participate, are expected closer to launch. What happens in Ottawa over the following months will matter well beyond it: if a shared, multi-brand, multi-retailer return system can function smoothly at city scale, it becomes a template other cities can copy rather than a novelty that stays where it started.

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