Defining circularity: Is sustainable a dirty word?

Is it just me or does the word sustainable feel a bit murky these days? Similar to the word awesome (how often are you really in jaw-dropping awe?), sustainable is a word that gets thrown around so frequently, it’s hard to decipher.

As a co-founder of topanga.io, I spend my days challenging throwaway culture. Topanga.io provides infrastructure for the circular economy. We help brands and restaurants implement reusable packaging programs. When it comes to environmentalism, our intent is to talk the talk AND walk the walk. So, it seems important to define what sustainability, and circularity, mean to us.

First, let’s get personal. Why do I care about sustainability, to begin with?

While working for a compostable tableware brand, I gained awareness of the concept of cradle-to-grave design. Simply put, this means that when designing a product, you think about what happens to it at the end of its useful life. Does it get recycled? Go to a landfill? Sadly, likely the latter.

Based on research from 5gyres, the average single-use plastic bag is used for 12 minutes. With 1 million plastic bags used every minute and less than 1% of plastic bags successfully recycled, this means that we are intentionally designing products that are likely to end up in our landfills, oceans, or other natural environments.

In the US, municipal recycling programs are primarily responsible for single-use plastic and packaging discard. Since only 9% of plastics are recycled (meaning yes, 91% are trashed), something is broken. And while compostable alternatives offer some theoretical hope, there are only 185 composting facilities in the US, with a fraction of these accepting compostable alternatives to single-use plastic.

Rather than wait for massive infrastructure improvements to take care of waste, I believe we can be empowered to create better systems. By designing products — and systems! — that take end-of-life scenarios into consideration, we can start to chip away at the ubiquitous microplastics and ever-increasing resource extraction that define our modern lives.

Enough about me already, let’s talk business. What’s the story of topanga.io?

At the start of COVID, all my packaging waste that had previously been spread across Los Angeles was now consolidated in my recycling bin (see above on why that’s an issue). My now co-founders and I started thinking, how can we create a system where we can enjoy the foods and products we want while also producing less waste?

So naturally, we started a grocery store. Milkman style. We received products in bulk reusable containers from local suppliers, packaged them into smaller reusable containers, and delivered them to consumers. Each week, we’d pick up the empty containers while dropping off refills.

Aha! We’d taken a linear consumption model (take- make- waste) and turned it circular (take- make- recirculate). We were successfully operating a closed-loop system. Rather than see packaging as a means-to-an-end for the customer to deal with, we took responsibility for it, turning it into a valuable, reusable, asset.

Here, people might start to ask — what about the greenhouse gases emitted when picking up empty containers? What about the water used when dishwashing and sanitizing reusable containers? Is this **really** better than single-use?

These are smart, valid, and important questions. And while the lifecycle assessment research committed to answering these questions is still growing, the data shows yes, reuse wins. Every time. (Thanks to this recent research from Upstream for highlighting that.)

While operating our market, we realized that the technology platforms available to us were designed for single-use, linear systems. That wouldn’t work, so we had to build our own.

Our proprietary software helped us better track our inventory, create a personalized customer experience and ensure that our containers would be reused enough times to create a positive environmental impact on our surroundings AND a positive financial impact on our business’s bottom line. After all, is a business really sustainable if it can’t pay its people?

We believe that well-managed, circular systems hold untapped potential in helping mitigate some impacts of climate change. So, we decided to use the topanga platform to support other companies who wish to implement and grow their own reusable programs. One company creating a circular system is niche. An ecosystem of businesses executing successful reusable programs? Well, that’s the start of a circular economy.

Okay, let’s get to the point — what does sustainability mean to us?

When we say sustainable, we mean systems that are designed to benefit people, profit, and the planet. It means leveraging the power of design, technology, and systems thinking to create a consumption model that embraces using the same to-go box 300 times vs. throwing something away after 12 minutes.

To us, a circular system means that a product continues to be used for its original intent. There are other modes of circularity that are important, but for us, that’s it. Reuse.

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We love to chat — send us a note at hello@topanga.io to connect.