• 2023: Reusable cups introduced for all poured alcoholic beverages

• September 19, 2024: Reusable cups expanded to every poured beverage, stadium-wide, diverting over a million cups that season alone

• Today: 5 SKUs across two locations on the Rose Quarter campus, with 1.8 million cups diverted to date and 773,000-plus diverted this season

The program is on track to hit 2 million cups diverted by the end of this year, 2026.

Why run an LCA now

Three years of operational data, funding support from Portland Metro, and a track record of steadily improving return rates gave Bold Reuse the foundation to move from operational intuition to scientific validation. As Kirsten Talabere, Sustainability Coordinator for Levy Restaurants put it, the goal wasn't just to do sustainable things; it was to confirm that the impact was real, tangible, and properly aligned with the program's goals.

BlueStrike Environmental came in with a condition of its own: full transparency, even if results showed something the team didn't want to see. Bold Reuse agreed. That shared commitment to rigor shaped the entire analysis.

Setting the scope: why "one beverage," not "one cup"

A functional unit is the specific thing an LCA measures. For a single-use product, that might simply be one cup. But because Rip City Reuse cups are used over and over, the team needed a unit that made reuse and single-use genuinely comparable.

The functional unit they landed on: one beverage served in a 20-ounce reusable PP cup, benchmarked against single-use PP, single-use PLA, and single-use paper alternatives. The 20-ounce size was chosen because it represents the highest-volume cup in operation, giving the analysis the most robust dataset to work from. Paper was included as a reference point only, since it's typically used for hot beverages and isn't a direct comparison.

The analysis measured three impact categories: global warming potential, marine eutrophication, and air acidification.

The headline result: break-even in about two uses

Under Moda Center's specific operating conditions, the reusable cup produces a more favorable environmental impact than the single-use PP cup after approximately two uses, and that holds across all three impact categories. Against the program's actual average of 8.32 uses per cup, the reusable system delivers the lowest impact of any option analyzed.

The real hotspot: raw materials, not transportation

One of the most counterintuitive findings: transportation and retail impacts were too small to even register on the analysis's charts. Across every cup type, the dominant driver of environmental impact is raw materials and ingredients — not the fuel spent moving cups between the venue and the wash facility.

That reframes where the biggest opportunities for improvement sit. The reuse phase (washing, packaging, transport) does grow in impact as a cup is used more times. Still, even after 8-plus uses, the ingredients embedded in manufacturing a single cup remain the largest single contributor to its footprint.

Return rate is still the lever that matters most

The analysis confirmed what the Bold Reuse and Moda Center teams have suspected from the start: return rate is the single biggest driver of the reuse system's advantage. Moda Center's return rate has climbed steadily, from 72% in year one, to 78% in year two, to 88% today, driven less by any single fix and more by growing familiarity among fans and staff, plus a new sorting partner brought on in January to recover cups during post-event sorts.

Separately, the program's retire rate (cups pulled from circulation due to damage) has held steady at just 2.2% across all three years, a reminder that return rate and retire rate measure two different things.

If return rate were to decline, the reuse phase would carry more proportional weight in the overall impact, which is exactly why the panel emphasized that protecting and improving return rate remains priority one.

What's next

The LCA surfaced three clear recommendations:

1. Protect and keep improving the return rate. This is still the single biggest lever available.

2. Explore lightweighting the cup, in partnership with manufacturers, without sacrificing durability.

3. Close remaining data gaps, including manufacturing water use, which wasn't tracked for any cup type in this round.

The team was upfront about the analysis's limitations, too: some inputs (like detergent and sanitizer quantities) were estimated due to proprietary supplier data, and manufacturing energy for paper and PLA cups relied on published benchmarks rather than primary data. A sensitivity analysis confirmed these estimates didn't change the outcome. The full study was also independently reviewed by a three-person panel against ISO LCA guidelines, so the results are technically and scientifically defensible rather than self-graded.

The bottom line

Three years of operational lifts, plus a rigorous, independently reviewed LCA, now back up what Rip City Reuse set out to prove: with a strong return rate, reusable cups beat single-use alternatives in under three uses and the program's real cups are averaging more than eight.

Rip City Reuse is closing in on 2 million cups diverted from landfill. Learn more about the program and the full LCA results at boldreuse.com.