Berlin’s successful gamble: making reuse as easy as bottle returns
It’s another regular weekday. You grab your morning coffee in a reusable cup from Burger King, drink it on your way to work, then effortlessly drop it into a machine at your local supermarket while picking up groceries – just like you’d return a glass bottle. No detours, no hassle, no guilt about single-use waste piling up.
This may seem like a pleasant daydream, but no: it’s happening right now in Berlin, where the ReuSe Vanguard Project (RSVP) is helping to turn reuse from a seemingly clunky process into something smooth and convenient for all.
Breaking new ground in Germany
Until now, you had to go back to a café or restaurant, which dispenses the type of reusable cups used, to return them. That works fine when you’re talking about a handful of environmentally conscious coffee shops. But when it gets to hundreds of thousands of cups moving through a city every day, the system breaks down fast, from chaos in manually sorting thousands of returned cups for HoReCa businesses to frustrated customers who just want an easy return option and their deposit back quickly. Berlin’s RSVP initiative cuts through this problem, similar to the project’s initiatives in cities like Barcelona or Rotterdam. Since March 2025, Environmental Action Germany (DUH) has been working with an impressive coalition – Rewe, Recup, Sykell, Profimiet, Tomra, Sielaff, and the Berlin Senate – to test something groundbreaking in the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg neighbourhood.
They’ve connected over 80 cafés and restaurants (including big names like Burger King, Kamps, and Le Crobag) with 8 Rewe supermarkets. For the first time ever, customers can return Recup cups (Germany’s biggest reusable cup system) through the same reverse vending machines (RVMs) that take their bottles, alongside Sykell’s Einfach Mehrweg cups and boxes.
This isn’t just a nice local experiment. Recup and Einfach Mehrweg already have millions of reusable containers circulating across thousands of German businesses. Testing how these massive systems can work together through shared infrastructure, however, is the kind of breakthrough that is reshaping reuse across Europe.
Reuse systems: magic in action
The process is easy and simple:
- Borrow a cup with your deposit at participating cafés or Rewe stores;
- Return it at any participating Rewe supermarket RVM during your regular shopping;
- Get your deposit receipt to use towards your grocery shopping or cash it back at the store;
- Behind the scenes, cups are sorted via a rubber belt and then travel to Profimiet’s industrial washing facility to be cleaned and scanned through Sykell’s digital platform before returning to cafés and stores.
This centralised approach solves multiple challenges at once: restaurants aren’t overwhelmed by returns; supermarkets become part of the reuse loop; and, suddenly, mass adoption of reuse systems doesn’t seem impossible anymore.
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Testing the blueprint for European reuse
What’s exciting is that Berlin isn’t just running a local pilot. They’re stress-testing the RSVP Blueprint that could harmonise reuse systems across Europe. The blueprint sets out five must-haves for effective reuse: effectiveness, recognition, interoperability, inclusiveness, and guaranteed safety. Berlin’s pilot tackles all of them.
Effectiveness: When return points are as convenient as your weekly grocery shop, return rates are likely to climb towards the 98%+ we see with beverage bottles. That’s the kind of performance that makes reuse competitive compared to single-use.
Recognition: By making different cup brands returnable in the same machines, customers start seeing reuse as a reliable, trustworthy option.
Interoperability: Right now, supermarkets use barcodes, while reuse systems often prefer QR codes. Berlin is testing how to harmonise these different approaches, which is crucial groundwork for the EU’s upcoming packaging regulation that will require all reusable packaging to carry scannable digital identifiers.
Inclusiveness: Whether customers prefer cash or card, and regardless of their digital literacy level, the system works for everyone – which is non-negotiable for mainstream reuse systems.
Guaranteed safety: Centralised washing at Profimiet means hygiene standards are consistently high, removing one of the most significant barriers to scaling reuse.
Learning from the bumps in the road
Implementing a new system always comes with some obstacles. Some of the challenges experienced by Berlin’s RSVP moment include:
- Cups without proper codes or those with lids attached cannot be processed automatically yet. This raises questions about preventing fraud and shows the need for better standardised labelling across the industry.
- Food containers – like Recup’s rebowls – don’t fit in the current RVMs because of their shape and size. This is a big deal if reuse is to cover full takeaway menus in the future, rather than just drinks. The solution might be adapting the machines to handle different packaging shapes, or designing containers that work with existing RVM interfaces (like the new Einfach Mehrweg food containers already do).
- While the project is making real progress by making two of the major market players – Recup and Einfach Mehrweg – work through the same system, the bigger challenge is integrating app-based systems into this infrastructure. There are promising solutions out there, but they need to be properly explored and tested before they can be rolled out at scale.
Identifying and tackling these challenges now will make the next generation of reuse systems stronger and simpler.
The bigger picture
Berlin’s reuse approach shows how reuse can easily become part of people’s existing routines and a natural part of city life. Moreover, it could work anywhere with national Deposit Return Schemes (DRS) – which is increasingly common across Europe.
The project runs until February 2026, with Kühne Logistics University tracking its impact. They’re surveying everyone involved (consumers, retailers, catering businesses) to understand whether this shared infrastructure actually changes behaviour and boosts reuse rates. Early results are already very promising: 84% of responding customers agree that “Returning cups via a reverse vending machine increases my willingness to use reusable cups instead of disposable cups when buying takeaway drinks in the future.”
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What comes next
If Berlin’s model succeeds, it could spread well beyond the city limits. But infrastructure alone won’t be enough: we’ll also need supportive policies. Single-use taxes like Tübingen’s pioneering approach, targeted bans on unnecessary single-use formats, and regulations that make reuse the obvious choice rather than the virtuous exception come to mind as good immediate steps.
Berlin is beta-testing the future of Europe’s circular economy. The results could determine whether reuse remains a niche option for the environmentally committed, or becomes as normal as returning an empty bottle to the supermarket – exactly the direction European countries have been pushed towards by EU legislation such as the PPWR.
Given what’s at stake for our throwaway culture, that’s a test worth watching closely.
Curious about other European cities implementing reuse systems? Learn more about the ReuSe Vanguard Project (RSVP) HERE.