“If you order from DeliverZero, a third party delivery service in New York City, your food will look different than the usual pile of plastic containers: instead, it will come in reusable clamshells. Then, the next time you order takeout from the platform, you can hand over those containers to the delivery driver and they’ll be returned to a participating restaurant, washed, and reused for another delivery.

Nationwide, food and packaging containers together account for almost 45% of landfill materials in the U.S. That’s not all takeout waste, but with the online food delivery market growing—it’s expected to be worth $200 billion by 2025—it’s easy to see how single use waste from food delivery adds up, especially during a pandemic that’s forcing more people to order in.

DeliverZero replicates other third party delivery services like GrubHub or UberEats: You go to the website, enter your address, place your order; and the restaurant will see the order come in on a tablet. But when they fill that order, they’ll pack it up in DeliverZero’s reusable containers, and use delivery drivers who know to accept those empty containers back. ‘Everything we do is designed to give the customer and the restaurant the same kind of feel that they’re used to,’ co-founder Adam Farbiarz says, ‘with this environmental twist.’

The platform has more than 100 restaurant partners, up from five when it first launched in November 2019, and Farbiarz says they’re adding about five to ten new restaurants a week. DeliverZero chose to make its own delivery platform, rather than partner with existing ones like other reusable container companies, because it solves the often-annoying problem of returning the reusables.”