Hard landing for packaging waste

One-way packaging is practically obsolete at the airport.

A pilot test has started successfully.

Also on board: the Munich Start Up Recup.

Airport - 3,500 lunches are usually served seven days a week from the canteen counters at Munich Airport. In Corona times, there are only 250 due to short-time work and home office, but the resulting packaging waste piles up threateningly. That is now over: The company Eurest, which operates the airport canteens on behalf of the airport subsidiary Allresto, is now relying on reusable bowls from the Munich start-up Recup. The test run began last week in the casino at the FMG corporate headquarters on Nordallee. Further canteens will follow gradually.

It's a picture that makes you smile: At lunchtime you can see airport employees running in droves from their offices to the canteen with bowls in hand. You are not allowed to eat there because of Corona. 500 are in circulation after a week of pilot testing. The Recup-Bowls can be purchased for a deposit of five euros. At the counters, the employees get lunch in new bowls, which end up in large boxes at the cash register from the day before. When they are full, they are pushed into the rinsing system and are available again a few minutes later.

Eurest declared war on garbage back in 2018, recalls operations manager Milovan Kovacevic. Back then, they at least relied on biodegradable packaging. These are still available today for guests who do not take part in the deposit system or who only come to eat once. "So far the response has been very good, most of them have already bought a bowl," assures Kovacevic. Allresto managing director Andreas Reichert reports: “We will stick to both systems, but the social pressure to change is great.” And as soon as you can eat in the canteen again, glass and china are taken out of the cupboards.

Before that, they looked at various reusable and deposit models and then decided on Recup, a Munich company that also produces bowls and bowls in Germany - in the Allgäu and Hamburg, both made of the plastic polypropylene, as Recup spokeswoman Greta Mayer reports. Not only is it 100 percent recyclable, the bowls can also be reused around 300 times, i.e. longer than a working year. In the office kitchens, the dishes in the bowls can also be reheated in the microwave. But you can also use them at home.

For the time being, only the bowls are available at Moos Airport, but, according to Reichert, Recup will soon also be delivering reusable coffee mugs - not only for the canteens, but also in the cafes and bistros in the terminals.

The hope: The system is spreading in such a way that you sit on the plane in Munich with a Recup cup and return it after landing in Hamburg, for example, according to the Allresto boss.

The FMG restaurant subsidiary also has its own reusable cups, but will switch completely to Recup due to compatibility.

Its cups have been around since 2016, the bowls were only introduced in June 2020 - in the middle of the corona pandemic, when food to go became part of everyday life.

This gave the start-up an enormous boost.

According to Mayer, there are already 60 employees, and the trend is rising.

The airport is one of the largest customers.

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