New Change(K)now! podcast series

Change(K)now! has launched a new short podcast series, hosted on the Coalition Clean Baltic podcast channel. In three episodes, we explore circular food packaging systems from different angles. The first episode, out now on Spotify, looks at what cities can do to reduce single-use food packaging and support the transition to reusable solutions.

A growing problem on city streets

The first guest is Sarosh Qureshi, Special Consultant within Green Business at the City of Copenhagen, one of Change(K)now! project partners. As a metropolitan city with a steady flow of residents and tourists using its streets and public spaces, Copenhagen generates a lot of packaging waste, and the problem is growing. Traditional restaurants are closing while take-away places are opening up.

“We did some analysis of the waste bins in the city, and around 50% of all the waste generated on the streets is take-away packaging,” says Sarosh.

For the city, cutting this waste means a cleaner city, lower taxes for citizens, fewer bins and less litter in nature and waterways. It is also a chance to try something new. “We like to take these kinds of risks and go into the innovation space,” Sarosh explains.

Lessons for other cities

In the episode, Sarosh shares how Copenhagen built its reusable food packaging system and what other cities can learn from it.

“Feasibility, sustainability and scalability: this is how we built the system. The most important learning is incentives. Without incentives, it’s really hard to get scale, and through scale to get companies involved in the system.”

Another key choice was to make the system open to everyone. “Our system in Copenhagen is universal, so any operator in Europe that wants to come to Copenhagen can use our return points, because that is something we demanded.” His advice to other cities is to design the system around people’s needs from the start.

Listen now

🎧 Listen to the first episode on Spotify here.

The next episode of the series focuses on events.

The podcast series is produced by project partner Coalition Clean Baltic in collaboration with Copyfabriken Sweden, and co-funded by the Interreg Baltic Sea Region Programme.

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