23 Million Plastic Cups Saved as Venues Switch to Reusables

When two Coldplay concerts in Las Vegas replaced throwaway cups with reusable ones, something remarkable happened. Fans barely noticed the difference, but the planet did: 23,000 single-use cups stayed out of the trash in just two nights.

Now that small change is becoming a big movement. The LA Crypto.com Arena permanently switched to reusables after those successful 2024 concerts, and by the end of 2025, the program had diverted more than 23 million single-use items from landfills.

The math behind this matters. An average stadium burns through 5.4 million disposable cups every single year. Multiply that across thousands of venues nationwide, and the waste becomes staggering.

Companies like r.World and Bold Reuse are making it easy for venues to break this cycle. They handle everything: delivering sturdy polypropylene cups, collecting them after events, washing them professionally, and bringing them back for the next game or concert. Each cup can be reused about 300 times.

Red Rocks Amphitheater, Arrowhead Stadium with the Kansas City Chiefs, and the Portland Trail Blazers have all joined the switch. The Charlotte Hornets and LA Coliseum are on board too.

Ocean Conservancy launched Protect Where We Play to spread the movement even further. The program partnered with athletes and entertainers because research showed people trust them and will take action when asked by someone they admire. Billie Eilish concerts in New York and a Lumineers show in Georgia have already participated, with more tour stops planned for 2026.

The goal: replace 1 million single-use cups with reusables. Jenna DiPaolo from Ocean Conservancy says showing venues the data makes the decision easy. When stadiums see the environmental impact and realize the service handles all the logistics, switching becomes a no-brainer.

The solution extends beyond cups. Americans use 1 trillion disposable food service items yearly, including containers, bags, and utensils. Upstream estimates that 840 billion of these could be replaced by reuse services.

Re:Dish proves it works at a smaller scale too. The company serves school cafeterias and company lunchrooms in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. They've kept 7 million products out of landfills by providing reusable dishware and handling all the washing.

Caroline Vanderlip, who founded Re:Dish, calls her company an industrial washing operation that solves a problem most institutions can't tackle alone. Schools and companies often lack the labor, space, or resources to make reusables work. Her service fills that gap.

When items finally wear out, they go to materials recovery facilities to be packaged and resold, never to landfills. Vanderlip says that matters deeply because America doesn't have enough landfill space, and plastic takes centuries to break down.

The Ripple Effect

This shift shows how infrastructure changes make sustainable choices automatic. When venues handle the system, fans don't need to remember reusable bottles or feel guilty about waste. They simply enjoy the game or concert while the environmental win happens behind the scenes.

The movement taps into something powerful: making the right choice the easy choice. No lectures, no sacrifice, just better systems that work for everyone.

As more venues see the success stories and crunch the numbers, the tipping point approaches. What started with a few concerts could reshape how America handles waste at every major gathering, one reusable cup at a time.

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