At the Olympics, reusable plastic cups are a gambit to reduce waste. Are they working?

Transcript

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At the Paris Olympics, there's a ubiquitous object you see at every venue - bright red, reusable, plastic cups. They are one of the most visible features of the sustainability efforts at the summer games and part of a gambit to reduce plastic waste. NPR's Becky Sullivan tried to find out if it's working.

BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: When you come to an Olympic venue and you want to buy soda or water, you don't get handed a plastic bottle. Instead, you're served your drink in what Olympic organizers call eco cups.

GUILLERMO MALDONADO: OK, I'm holding the reusable drinks cups. These ones - we got it for one Coke and one beer, I guess.

SULLIVAN: Customers like this Mexican fan, Guillermo Maldonado, pay an extra two euros as a deposit for each cup. A lot of people like him return the cups afterward to get their money back. Others just throw them away. Go to enough events, though, and you see people getting pretty wacky, like when I saw a woman carrying a stack of cups out of an arena.

ALMA ISABEL WETERENGS: Hi. Yeah, we are collecting them. We're trying to collect them.

SULLIVAN: This is Alma Isabel Weterengs and her husband, Marco Zwynenburg.

How many are you holding tonight?

WETERENGS: Oh, this is two, four, six, eight. This is eight.

MARCO ZWYNENBURG, BYLINE: There's another - right? - I think 16 or something.

SULLIVAN: You have eight more in your backpack.

ZWYNENBURG: Yeah, yeah.

WETERENGS: Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

SULLIVAN: Each cup has a different sport on it, so there are about 50 cups in total. These two are trying to collect them all.

WETERENGS: Few over there, probably.

ZWYNENBURG: We've got 35 or something like that between.

SULLIVAN: The goal for the Paris Olympics was to reduce plastic waste by 50% from the 2012 games in London. That's a big challenge when you're serving 18 million drinks, says Georgina Grenon, the director of sustainability for Paris 2024.

GEORGINA GRENON: So it was important for us to work on a different way to serve that. Otherwise, it would have been 18 million bottles, you know, single-use plastic bottles.

SULLIVAN: The dream was to use only reusable containers. People are allowed to bring their own bottles into venues, and the cups that are returned get washed and reused. But one big wrinkle was that many concession stands weren't able to accommodate soda fountains. A lot of them are temporary and don't have running water, so plastic bottles are part of the process anyway.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: You have to open, of course, the bottle. Then you put it in the cup, eco cup.

SULLIVAN: This concessions worker asked us not to use her name so she wouldn't lose her job. When people order a soda from her, she gets a plastic bottle out of the fridge and pours that into the cup, then hands the cup to the customer.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: But the way we fill the cup is with a bottle, but the bottle we throw. It's plastic.

SULLIVAN: Organizers have defended this because normally, consumers don't often recycle plastic bottles. So it's better, they say, for workers to recycle them instead. Here's Grenon again.

GRENON: In spite of the fact that we're using some plastic bottles, those bottles are a hundred percent recycled, unlike what happens in real life, in which, at least in France, only 1 bottle out of 4 gets recycled. And we are securing a hundred percent of it.

SULLIVAN: But there's still one question. What the heck happens to all the cups? Grenon is tight-lipped about that. There is a plan, she says, but they have to get through the Paralympics first. Until then, there are some people doing more than their part to return the cups.

CHRISTOPHER: So as soon as people start leaving, you start kind of looking around, pick some up. And then you take a stack, and you get a 20-euro bill.

SULLIVAN: This is Christopher, who's from Texas. He asked that we only use his first name so that he doesn't get banned from the venues. He's been going to Olympic events with his mom, and after each one, they case the place for discarded cups, return them for the deposits and then take that money to buy souvenirs.

CHRISTOPHER: But don't let people catch onto it because it's our, you know, business for the moment, to get Olympic souvenirs.

SULLIVAN: It's all a little silly, he says, But whatever keeps the plastic out of the trash is a good thing. Becky Sullivan, NPR News, Paris.

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