Ottawa Is About to Find Out Whether "Reuse" Can Work at City Scale

For years, reusable packaging has lived mostly in pilot programs: a coffee shop testing a deposit cup here, a grocery chain trialing refillable bottles there. Useful data, but small enough to dismiss. This quarter, that changes. The Consumer Goods Forum's Plastic Waste Coalition of Action, working with the reuse-infrastructure company Reposit, is launching the Reuse City Canada Project — a city-wide test of reusable packaging across Ottawa, expected to go live in Q3 2026, right now.

The mechanics are simple by design. At participating stores, everyday personal and home care products will be sold in reusable containers. Shoppers pay a small refundable deposit, use the product, and return the empty container to a designated in-store point. From there, Reposit's system takes over: collection, professional washing, and recirculation back onto shelves. What makes this different from a single brand's refill station is the shared infrastructure. Reposit is building common return points, reverse logistics, washing capacity, and data systems that work across retailers and brands simultaneously, with return messaging standardized in English and French so the experience doesn't fragment store to store.

The list of participants is the real signal here. Unilever, Procter & Gamble, and L'Oréal — companies that rarely coordinate on packaging infrastructure — are putting products into the same reuse system. Retail partners include Walmart Canada, Loblaws, Shoppers Drug Mart, Real Canadian Superstore, and Your Independent Grocer, meaning a shopper could plausibly return a container at one chain that was purchased at another. Amcor, Avery Dennison, Circulr, and IBM are supporting the build, and funding comes partly from the Government of Canada and Handelens Miljøfond, the Norwegian Retailers' Environment Fund, with the Canada Plastics Pact also involved. That's a wide coalition for what is, ultimately, a test.

And it is explicitly framed as a test. Cédric Dever, who directs the CGF's Plastic Waste Coalition, called Ottawa "an exciting breakthrough in collective action," but the stated goal isn't to declare victory — it's to generate "credible evidence of what works" that can be replicated elsewhere. Reposit founder Stuart Chidley put it more bluntly: shifting from single-use to reuse "requires more than good intentions — it demands collective action and systemic change across the entire value chain." Canada's Minister of Environment, Climate Change and Nature, Julie Dabrusin, framed it in economic terms too, noting that durable packaging "keeps the value of our resources in the economy and out of landfills."

The skepticism around reuse systems is fair and well-earned: return rates, washing logistics, and contamination have sunk pilots before. But there's precedent worth watching here. In Petaluma, California, Closed Loop Partners worked with Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Starbucks to make reusable cups the default at local restaurants, and reported a 51% return rate — respectable for a first-generation system. Lisbon has since rolled out a city-wide reusable cup network with TOMRA and local hospitality groups, recently adding contactless payment support, and expects to avoid millions of single-use cups annually. Ottawa is a bigger swing: not cups, but everyday household products, across five major retail banners, from three of the world's largest consumer goods companies at once.

Whether Ottawa becomes the blueprint Dever hopes for depends on unglamorous details — how many containers actually make it back, how washing costs compare to virgin packaging, whether shoppers tolerate the extra step. Those numbers won't be public for a while. But the fact that competitors agreed to share infrastructure at all suggests the industry believes reuse's biggest obstacle was never the concept — it was the plumbing.

Source: Unilever, L'Oréal and P&G join reuse project rolling out across Ottawa — Packaging Europe