Top: Images courtesy Biosphere Institute of the Bow Valley and Upstream Policy Institute, Inc.

In 2023, the Town of Banff, Alberta, passed a Single-Use Item (SUI) Reduction Bylaw & Strategy that requires reusables for on-site dining, while a voluntary program, called Banff Borrows, focuses on collaborating with business and nonprofit sector partners to work toward a citywide reusable system for takeaway cups and containers. The Town of Banff, located in Canada’s first National Park and UNESCO World Heritage Site, receives over 4 million visitors each year and has no landfills or recycling facilities. Upstream, a nonprofit working to build a reuse economy, recently interviewed Carla Bitz, the Town of Banff’s Environmental Coordinator, on its Indisposable Podcast about implementation of the bylaw and strategy. “We are seeing quick-service restaurants (QSR) either bring back or implement new reuse systems and are learning that there is broad recognition in the QSR industry that we need to go in this direction,” said Bitz. “They understand that there is an enhanced customer experience with reuse, partially as a result of policies like this coming into place. The Banff McDonald’s, for example, is the second in Canada to implement reusables onsite. We are also seeing many events in Banff starting to utilize reusables when they otherwise would have defaulted to disposable, because it’s required in the bylaw.”

One of the challenges, Bitz told Upstream, is “sometimes doing reuse takes longer, or impacts businesses’ bottom line. For example, with a lineup out the door of a café, single-use can be quicker — and quicker turnaround means more customers served. So even though generally speaking, procuring single-use is ultimately more expensive than reuse, the sheer volume of customers can make the single-use option more profitable in some business models.”