Refills Build Towards Seattle Goals and Infrastructure

Pushing solid waste into a compactor at the South Seattle Transfer Station (Kevin Clark, The Seattle Times)

The Refillery Blues

Have you ever felt the refillery blues? I’ve felt lonely, thinking, What’s the point of refilling when there are so many single-use products? Here’s one counterpoint: when you refill, you allow refilleries to exist. And refilleries allow many people to use everyday products without generating waste.

The city of Seattle sings the same tune, prioritizing waste prevention to achieve its climate goals and protect its land, water, and air. “We are shifting the focus upstream,” says SPU in its 2024 annual solid waste report, “away from managing waste after it’s created and towards stopping waste from being generated in the first place.” In this post I’ll walk you through this report, showing you how every refill impacts SPU’s new goals and builds regional reuse infrastructure.

Every Refill Reduces Waste

SPU’s primary focus is to reduce our municipal solid waste (MSW), which is the sum of all our garbage, recycling, and compost. Their 2030 goal is for every person in Seattle to generate 5.07 lb or less of it per day. The chart below graphs the results for the past 25 years as well as Seattle’s population. Seattle daily MSW generated (garbage, recycling, and compost) per person for the past 25 years and Seattle population (2024 SPU Annual Solid Waste Report with yearly annotations by Eric Thorne)

The results are incredible. Not only did daily MSW per person decrease 0.1 lb from 2023 to 2024, it did so while the population grew. Indeed, this trend has continued while the population has grown 15-20k per year since 2022. When you refill, you directly impact this metric. To reach our 2030 goal, everyone would need to generate 0.14 lb less waste per day than they did in 2024, just slightly more than the reduction from 2023!

That’s not a lot. In fact, it’s the weight of the empty deli container plus plastic shipping materials shown below. This could have been the packaging of a new bottle of soap! But it adds up: tossing these materials daily would weigh about 50 lb per year! Every time you refill, you avoid generating any solid waste, bringing us closer to our goal.

The weight of this packaging is equivalent to the reduction in daily MSW per person needed to get to our 2030 goal (Eric Thorne)

But doesn’t commercial waste still dominate? Actually, in 2024 residential waste accounted for 38.8% of the total. Commercial was just slightly more at 42.6%. When you refill, you shrink the sizes of the Single-family and Multifamily pie slices.

Estimated single-family and multifamily percentages of generated MSW (garbage, recycling, and compost) compared to other sectors (2024 SPU Annual Solid Waste Report)

Even though the proportions of disposed waste (garbage, sent to landfill) were very different between the single-family and multifamily subgroups, the total tonnage was about the same for each at around 60-70k tons, both increases from 2023. This is reflected in the daily MSW disposed per person chart below, which increased 0.14 lb in 2024 to 2.68 lb per person per day. SPU’s 2030 goal is 2.13 lb per person per day. Taken together with the first chart, it appears that we're generating less daily total waste, but more of that is garbage.

Seattle daily MSW disposed (garbage, sent to landfill) per person for the past 25 years and Seattle population (2024 SPU Annual Solid Waste Report with yearly annotations by Eric Thorne)

What are we throwing away? Possibly more recyclables. The chart below shows that in 2015 and 2020, we recycled about the same amount (about 70k tons), but landfilled much more in 2020, leading to a lower capture rate. The capture rate is the percentage of recyclables that were correctly sorted. Perhaps this was due to the pandemic; we will see when the 2025 data are released.

Seattle recycling tons collected and capture rate over the last 25 years (2024 SPU Annual Solid Waste Report)

SPU's capture rate goal of 70% has been reached and exceeded since 2005. Why isn't it higher? The report mentions that "the City has limited ability to influence the recyclability of products and materials in the MSW stream," which may reference the growth of new materials and composites that are difficult to sort and recycle. The ever-changing mix of materials entering the waste stream will continue to challenge the capture rate. However, when you refill, the container does not enter the waste stream. Instead, it’s reused directly, extending its life cycle.

Refilleries are Infrastructure

You may have heard of “circular economies” that reuse materials in a closed-loop system. Seattle has gone a long way in creating one for recyclables, sending 80% of recycling tonnage to regional markets in the US and Canada in 2020 (see Table 5.2). But when you refill, you introduce a new cycle into the system where durable packaging can be reused again and again (see purple annotations in the figure below).

Materials and products lifecycle (2024 SPU Annual Solid Waste Report with refill cycle annotations by Eric Thorne)

One 5-gallon bucket of soap replaces about twenty-seven 24-oz bottles by volume. When you refill, you make this kind of distribution possible. You can think about it as sharing one bucket with at least twenty-seven other customers. Even if you don’t refill every time, someone else will. On the supply side, regional manufacturers may begin to serve more refilleries in the area. These arrangements form the foundation of reuse infrastructure: systems providing these essential goods waste-free and helping us reach our shared goals. We're excited to play our part in providing an option for 🎵folks to get their soaps from a neighborhood place, without waste 🎵. Now that’s a cure for the blues!

One 5-gallon bucket holds the equivalent of about twenty-seven 24-fl oz bottles (Eric Thorne)