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Michael Martin likes to tell people he sells “ugly cups”. The hope is no one will like them enough to want to keep them.

Martin, who runs a reusable serveware company called r.World, tried offering nicer-looking cups as part of his quest to reduce the mountains of plastic bottles left behind at concerts and music festivals. For a small refundable deposit, attendees could get their beer and soft drinks in sturdy cups branded with band logos.

But the deposit system, which had worked in Europe, didn’t translate well to the United States. People didn’t seem to understand or care that they were supposed to return the cups. They pocketed them as souvenirs.

“Americans feel like if they pay the deposit, they’ve bought the cup and have the right to take it home,” Martin said.

That’s why, at a recent Keith Urban concert at Maryland’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, the venue was packed with fans drinking out of clear plastic glasses with plain block lettering that implored: “Please return me. I’m reusable!” People were guided to drop the cups in bright yellow bins, so they could be collected and taken to a facility to be cleaned, sanitised and packaged for reuse.

About 200 music venues, stadiums, arenas, zoos and convention centres across the United States are using r.World’s “ugly cups”.

Whereas just a few years ago, environmentally conscious venue operators promoted recycling to steer waste away from landfills, there has been a growing movement in favour of reusable food and drink containers.

Venues are now seeking out full-service reuse companies, willing to pay higher costs to avoid the scourge of plastic waste. Last year, the world’s second-largest concert promoter, AEG, replaced all single-use cups at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles with reusable drinkware. Businesses are popping up around the country to meet the demand, with names like Re:Dish, Bold Reuse and Cup Zero.

“I wish I could say reuse is mainstream. It’s not quite there yet, but there certainly is a groundswell,” said Caroline Vanderlip, founder of the company Re:Dish, which has industrial-scale washing facilities in Philadelphia, New York and Boston.

When the company began signing up clients in 2022, Vanderlip said most of the interest came from big businesses with company cafeterias. Re:Dish is now in universities, K-12 public schools, senior living centres and is about to ink its first deal with an arena, she said. What started as a coastal movement is growing, she said. “I have heard from three markets in the Midwest in the last two weeks.”

The change has been rapid. Martin wouldn’t share financial details about his Minneapolis-based company, but he pointed to the number of reusable cups and food containers it has in circulation as evidence of its growth.

“To give you a sense, in 2021 we washed 100,000 units,” he said, referring to all the items that passed through the company’s washing facilities. “In 2024, we did 7.5 million. This year, we’re probably going to do over 12 million.”

According to the company, each cup can be reused about 300 times.

“The number of people we’re touching every day with reuse – it’s huge,” Martin said. “It’s opening people’s minds.”

The scale of the live event industry’s waste problem is still staggering. According to a 2024 report by Upstream, a reuse advocacy organisation, the average stadium hosting 300 events annually uses 5.4 million single-use cups, sending 58 tonnes of plastic waste to landfills. And while food containers and plastic condiment packets add up, advocates for reducing plastic waste say the biggest problem, purely by volume, is beverage concessions. A few years ago, Oceana, a conservation group, estimated that a 10% increase in reusable beverage packaging by 2030 could eliminate over 1 trillion single-use plastic bottles and cups globally.

Most of the companies trying to solve this problem are still using plastic, in large part because many venues have banned metal and glass for safety reasons. Some also offer stainless steel and aluminium cups. In a carbon life-cycle analysis of different materials, stainless steel and polypropylene came out on top, provided the cups were washed at least six times.

At Merriweather, an outdoor amphitheatre, the introduction of reusable cups has cut the venue’s waste in half, said Brad Canfield, vice-president of operations. As he talked, he peered into a yellow collection bin, quickly scanning to see how many cups had been returned. The better the return rate, the less the venue pays per cup.

Fortunately, there was fairly good compliance from the crowd of women in jean skirts and cowboy boots and men working hard to look rugged. Some events do even better. Canfield said concertgoers at a two-day jam band festival the previous weekend had returned “close to 100%” of the cups.

In addition to Merriweather, the four other venues owned and operated by DC-based IMP have started using reusable cups. Donna Westmoreland, IMP’s chief operating officer, said the company remains an outlier on the East Coast. The transition to reusable food containers and cups is much further along in the western US, she said, led by major venues in Denver, Los Angeles and Seattle. She is trying to persuade the owners of more DC venues and sports stadiums to make the switch, aiming to create an economy of scale.

“I think there’s some pressure,” Westmoreland said. “You can’t say that you’re going to be this eco-friendly destination event and then have single-use plastics all over the place.”

Despite the progress, plenty of challenges remain.

While some large universities – including the University of Southern California, UC Berkeley and the University of Washington – are beginning to introduce reuse into their cafeterias and stadiums, the professional sports world lags behind. Some venue operators are loath to make changes to their concessions, worried it could dampen customers’ experience. Others have agreed to bring in reusables only for one-off performances when artists such as U2 or Maggie Rogers requested them.

Another reason not to switch is the upfront cost. Reusable cups and food containers are more expensive than throwaway items because of the labour needed to collect and wash them, though some of this can be offset by lower landfill disposal charges for venues.

In addition, Westmoreland said beverage companies make it easier and cheaper for venues to use single-use plastic bottles instead of selling fountain drinks. Beverage makers “need that brand walking around in somebody’s hands”, she said.

Yet for all the difficulties, Crystal Dreisbach of Upstream said the live-event business is the clearest place to start growing the movement.

“Restaurants have no time for anything,” she said.

Instead, she’s helping to build out centralised infrastructure for washing, transportation and other services to make reuse the cheaper option over disposable packaging for any business:

“We want to see this infrastructure in every large metro area, so it becomes a utility,” she said.

At the Paris Olympics last year, French company Re-uz supplied 20 million cups. Upstream is hoping to work with LA organisers to expand reuse systems for use during and beyond the 2028 Olympic Games. Reuse, Dreisbach argued, could become the “fourth bin” next to trash, recycling and compost.

LA’s venue plan includes several existing event spaces that are working with r.World, and advocates for reuse are pushing the cities of Toronto and Vancouver to adopt policies eliminating single-use food and beverage containers during the 2026 World Cup. Yet neither the Olympic nor World Cup organisers have publicly committed to offering reusable cups at every venue.

“Stadiums have been slow to adopt these things,” said Lisa Delpy Neirotti, an associate professor of sport management at the George Washington University School of Business.

In the music industry, environmentally conscious artists led the way, at times forcing venues’ hands by putting reusable requirements in their tour riders. But Neirotti noted that big-name athletes have been more reluctant to address the issue.

“I haven’t heard of any of them going to ownership and saying let’s do reuse,” she said. “If some high-level star player came in and started making that their cause, it could start making people talk.”