Enviu, Fair Resource Foundation, and 12 core partners have received approval for INTERPOOL, a 3.5-year European initiative aimed at solving one of the biggest obstacles in reuse today: the lack of a unified, cross-border system for reusable glass packaging.
INTERPOOL is one of Europe’s largest coordinated initiatives for glass reuse. Enviu will spearhead the development of critical system components, enabling interoperable reuse systems across Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands.
Today, reusable glass systems are limited by national borders. Each country has its own bottle formats, logistics networks, data practices, and regulations, making large-scale reuse extremely challenging. INTERPOOL seeks to break down these barriers, allowing bottles to move freely, be returned anywhere, and processed efficiently across the region.
This work brings together Enviu, Fair Resource Foundation, 12 core partners, and a wider network of associated partners to align standards, deposits, data, and infrastructure so reusable glass can finally operate at a European scale.
We love glass. It’s an inert material that is easy to clean, non-toxic, and consumers trust it. But the way we use it today is incredibly energy-intensive. Recycling glass means melting it at almost 1,200 degrees. That carries a huge environmental cost.-Elise Lippens, Head of Enviu's Zero Waste Europe Programme
INTERPOOL will work to harmonize bottle formats, deposit levels, and data standards across the participating countries while identifying and removing key policy and regulatory barriers that currently limit cross-border reuse. The project will also map existing infrastructure and align washing and logistics systems to understand what can be leveraged and what needs adaptation. Ultimately, the goal is to design a scalable model that can be replicated well beyond the initial project countries.
Our aim isn’t to build one more reusable system. It’s to create the conditions for every reusable system to scale across Europe. We’re not designing a Dutch solution or a French solution. We’re designing a European backbone for reuse.Elise Lippens, Head of Enviu's Zero Waste Lab
This ecosystem work is crucial for Enviu because the technology and tools needed for reuse already exist, what’s missing is the system around them. Reuse only becomes viable when it operates at large scale, when behaviour change is supported by widespread availability, and when competitors are willing to collaborate pre-competitively on shared standards, logistics, and policy. Enviu’s role is to connect these pieces: bringing the right stakeholders together, aligning incentives, and co-creating a system that no single actor can build alone.