Shampoo And Ice Cream In A Metal Can? Meet 'Loop,' A New Way To Cut Down On Plastic Waste

A new shopping platform called Loop — brought to life by Tom Szaky, the CEO of recycling firm TerraCycle — plans to offer reusable containers for some 300 household products in partnership with some of the world’s largest consumer brands.

"The general idea with Loop is that instead of the consumer owning their packages at the end when they're empty, it's always owned by the manufacturer. Instead of it going to waste or recycling, we simply pick it back up from the consumer, clean it and around it goes again — sort of like the way milk used to be delivered back in the 1950's,” Szaky tells Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson.

Szaky says the vision behind Loop is "to solve waste at the root cause, which we think really is this idea of using something once or disposability."

He says the circular shopping platform will help consumers drastically cut back on plastic waste all around the house, not just within their kitchen cabinets.

“The idea is to bring this reuse model to absolutely everything, from your laundry detergent to your mouthwash, from your orange juice to your granola," he says. "I mean, truly everything — in partnership with the world's biggest manufacturers — to really try to shift consumption from a disposable system to a circular one.”