Don’t Waste Durham creates the infrastructure and services needed to grow city-wide reuse systems.

We are building within our community the microcosm of what we want the world to look like. This includes:

✔️ Wash facility, routes, city-wide return stations that make possible return, collection, processing, and redistribution of reusable packaging.

✔️ Curbside collection of reusables

✔️ Testing the existing infrastructure of the recycling industry as a potential means to facilitate a societal shift to reusables – creating new revenue streams for a struggling recycling system that is overdue to evolve.


And since 2017, we continue to implement reusable solutions for:

✔️ Restaurant, food truck, and pizza shop packaging

✔️ Grocery store packaging

✔️ Events, large venues, and festival grounds

✔️ Local producers’ consumer packaged goods

✔️ School lunch serveware

Reuse is the future, and it’s what the world needs:

  1. Reuse is an economic movement. It builds workforce, grows wealth, and creates resilience in communities. Reuse eliminates our dependence on global supply chain, because it circulates resources locally. Reuse “decouples our economic activity from the consumption of finite resources” (1).

  2. Reuse is a social justice movement. Disposable systems exploit and pollute, causing harm to disadvantaged communities, BIPOC populations, and women. Reuse systems reduce negative health outcomes, because they do not contain the toxins inherent in single-use packaging which enter landfills, streets, local waterways, oceans, the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe.

  3. Reuse systems mean human and ecosystem survival. Reuse systems are regenerative, reducing carbon emissions by 98% compared to disposable, and significantly conserving fossil fuels, water, and electricity.

  4. Reuse systems add more love to communities.

(1) Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Here’s the connection between our city-wide reuse systems and GLOBAL impacts:

What’s needed next:

  1. Be the large anchor client that city-reuse systems need. Hey there, institutions, governments, corporations, stadiums, and school systems: We need you to step up your commitment and be a part of the solution! City-wide reuse systems need at least one large anchor client that make reuse possible for all the other sectors in a community.

  2. Help us to help us all. Hey, local governments and state governments, do you have sustainability goals? We can help you meet them. Reuse checks A LOT of boxes – significantly reduces carbon emissions, prevents literal tons of waste, and saves a large amount of water and electricity. Reuse will get you measurable impact! For a start, local governments need to support reuse infrastructure financially, adopt reuse themselves, and pass supportive policy. Put reuse in your budgets and programming.

  3. Let’s expand our minds. We need to be thinking about reuse systems as a means to expand workforce development. Reuse requires labor, and that means jobs! This includes living-wage jobs for underemployed populations, including autistic and intellectually and developmentally disabled (IDD) people, formerly incarcerated people, military veterans, and the vision impaired can all be created with reuse systems.

  4. Lots more things, but ^^ those ^^ are the ones we think about all the time.