10 centimes plus

10 centimes plus is a not-for-profit encouraging corporate food vendors to charge for single-use take-away containers.

The Problem
Single use plastics are an environmental hazard. Plastic bags, coffee cups, or takeaway boxes are produced using fossil fuels, consumed once, and then end up on a waste heap. Recycling is very difficult given the nature of these containers - coffee cups for example need to be waterproof so must contain a layer of plastic - this makes recycling impossible despite the outer layer of cardboard or the perception of the user. Food contamination makes this even more difficult. (Source: []). Even if perfectly recycled, this model of creation for a single purpose, to then be wasted, is wasteful of resources.

The Scale
Focusing in on disposable lunch takeaway containers, the scale can quickly grow when thinking about a city the size of Paris. Take a single restaurant who is targeting corporate lunch-goers - people who leave their office to go and get a takeout lunch each day. One of these restaurants might sell 400 salads a day, the vast majority of which are taken away in disposable, single use containers.
This single restaurant - 380 containers a day, 250 working days a year - this produces 95,000 single-use take-away lunch containers a year. There are roughly 1000 such restaurants in the Ile de France area - this creates 9500 tonnes of carbon dioxide and 2850 tonne of single-use waste per year - or 5700km of plastic all stacked up! That's 17,000 Eiffel Towers per year!

The Solution
There are many solutions to this problem, and it is not an easy problem to solve, as it is one of human behaviour. While lots of takeaway lunch places in Paris offer reuseable alternatives for take-away, but uptake is low - I know, I go to these places nearly every single day.How do you get people to bring their own lunch-containers? You add a surcharge! Not much - just 10c - but it's enough to get people thinking about the value of single-use containers.This has been incredibly successful wherever it has been implemented for plastic bags (Source: [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6399129/]). A slight surcharge meant that people brought their own bags instead of getting new ones every time at the store. The same success can happen for take-away lunch containers!Why could this work:
1. People often go straight from their office to the lunch spot, so they can leave their reusable container at the office and then carry it to/from the lunch spot - no need to lug around a heavy reusable take-away box.
2. 10c is normally <1% of the cost of a meal - it won't financially disadvantage anyone, and won't make people go to competitors - it's only a mental addition on a single use container, rather than a real financial burden.
3. Such a scheme would reduce costs for the restaurant as well - any revenue covers costs of securing the take-away boxes, and people bringing in their own boxes would reduce the number of boxes the venue needs to buy!

Implementation
10cplus aims to reach out, starting with the large chains, and finally focusing on all restaurants that serve a corporate take-out client, encouraging them to adopt a 10c surcharge on their take-away containers. Organisations that agree to sign up will join our voluntary members club, will receive a sticker to raise awareness, and will help reduce the amount of single-use waste that we produce, reduce costs, and help the planet!