The "Renomat" - the solution for returning reusable containers to the cycle

Empty reusable containers made of glass and stainless steel have one disadvantage from the consumer's point of view: they cannot be folded to save space. So where to put them when the contents are used up? Very few people have room for huge stores of deposit containers behind kitchen doors, on shelves and under the sink.

The next problem in everyday life: the next time you go shopping, you want to return the deposit containers but you forget them at home. To prevent this from happening, the reuse cycle of the returnable containers is included in the construction of the houses on the Frankfurt Bridges.

Accordingly, for each household on the bridges there are two "Renomats" aesthetically matching the apartment furnishings when tenants move in. The artificial word "Renomat" stands for Renaissance or Reuse Automat. 

Renomats are collection bins disguised as designer furniture. The garbage cans are used to collect deposit containers or reusable packaging on the one hand and to dispose of plastics on the other, which are incinerated with residue-free CO2 filtration. Neither may be mixed with waste paper, organic waste or residual waste.

The design collection containers are available in all possible variants

"Trash cans" are not a nuisance if they do not look like trash cans. Renomats have the look & feel of a piece of furniture - you can choose the Renomat that suits your home according to your personal taste.

The Renomat must not get in the way and take up too much space

Additional pieces of furniture in the kitchen can be a nuisance not only because of their appearance, but also because they take up space. Therefore, in addition to its function as a storage container, a Renomat can also be used as a stool, a sideboard or a shelf; for this purpose, it is available in two different heights: 50 cm high for sitting and 70 cm high as a sideboard. Accordingly, the Renomats are sturdily built and stand on lockable casters: As long as you fill it with reusable packaging and other sustainable packaging in the kitchen, you can lock the casters; and when you don't need it in the kitchen because it's full, you release the casters‘ lock and push it into the hallway, where it can again serve as seating or storage until its insert filled with packaging is removed and carried to the garbage cans in front of the house.

To ensure that there is always room in the household for reusable packaging and sustainable plastic packaging, you need reserve Renomat inserts

Each household on the bridges - as well as the direct residents along the bridge - receives two Renomats including inserts at the beginning together with the bridge card. Households with more than four household members, receive 3 Renomats. While full inserts are taken out of the apartment, the Renomat - as a piece of furniture with individually selected design - remains in the apartment.

For every insert that is in a Renomat, there is an empty counterpart outside by the garbage cans waiting to be replaced, so it shouldn't happen that all the inserts are full and there is no more room for empty packaging.

Full Renomat inserts are regularly exchanged by the garbage collectors for empty clean ones - but only when they „report“ appropriate filling

Renomat inserts are not emptied by tipping their content into a refuse collection vehicle. Full garbage cans or full Renomat inserts are exchanged for empty ones by the bridges‘ waste collection service. This protects the reusable glass containers and is much quieter. This is also important because emptying takes place at night, as the driving lanes on the bridges have to be used by autonomous traffic without any traffic jam during the day.

Full garbage cans or inserts are not only exchanged for empty ones, but above all for clean ones: this is because empty packaging containers are placed in the insert directly by the consumer, without a trash bag, which causes the insert to become regularly soiled. All inserts are cleaned by the garbage collector as soon as they have been emptied at the industrial cleaning facility.

The Renomat inserts are only replaced when they are full. This requires a smart control system for waste collection: An integrated scale in the compartment system at the waste garbage cans detects full Renomat inserts and reports this to the central coordination center. This is how the exchange is planned.

The exchange on the bridges - quiet and centrally controlled

On the Frankfurt Bridges, no garbage collectors roll the garbage cans and Renomat inserts to their places at the houses, but all bins sit on small pallets that travel autonomously, i.e. are controlled centrally.

At the beginning of his tour, the garbage truck is filled with empty garbage cans (or better say: Renomat inserts). It drives to the groups of houses on the bridges one after the other, as soon as he stops a sliding door of the garbage truck opens, the floor sinks and a ramp comes out so that the empty garbage cans (i.e. Renomat inserts) can drive out of the garbage truck one after the other to their exchange partners at the group of houses. The Renomat inserts there are also placed on pallets.

When the Renomat insert is replaced, the full Renomat insert first rolls out of its compartment, and the empty Renomat insert rolls into the empty space and becomes the new garbage can.

The full Renomat insert can move autonomously to the garbage truck on ist pallets, through a rear sliding door into it, and when this has been done for all Renomat inserts of the group of houses, the garbage truck (or better say „Renomat truck) closes its sliding door and moves on. 

A total of 108 inserts (width x length 40x40cm) can be transported in a pickup truck with 3 levels, each with an area of 12 square meters. If 35,000 bridge residents, living on average in pairs, need 2 inserts per week, then 35,000 inserts must be exchanged every week. This equates to approximately 280 exchange trips, or 40 per night. If each car makes 2 complete exchange trips per night, then 22 pickup cars are needed, plus 1 if another fails.

The standardized reusable packaging system of the Frankfurt Bridges also reduces the empty run rate of trucks

The share of empty runs by German trucks on the roads is just under 40%, since after delivery of goods to retailers or their storehouses, on the return trip, in more than half of the cases no goods are transported back.

On the Frankfurt Bridges, the reusable containers made of sturdy glass or wafer-thin enameled steel are diverse, but ultimately still limited in their designs: Many models can be used by a wide variety of product manufacturers for filling or packaging.

In the case of the bridge's reusable containers, this enables an optimized circulation system: The trucks of the companies that previously supplied the bridge stores with goods pick up the pre-cleaned reusable containers suitable for their products for the return trip, which would reduce the current empty trip rate.

The companies then take care of industrially cleaning and refilling the containers.

The whole packaging system automatically favors primarily manufacturers from the region and then manufacturers from Germany or Europe.

Deposits will be refunded only if reusable containers are treated considerately

The scan code on the packaging is not only used for product information and payment, but it is also part of a deposit system: When shopping, the code is scanned and the corresponding deposit is deducted from the bridge card. As soon as the container has been returned in one piece, the deposit is credited back to the bridge card.

The deposit per package varies between 5 cents and 30 cents. It is estimated that 30 reusable packages are in use per person each week, of which around a third remain in the household for longer periods with longer-lasting products (e.g. flour or rice), so that only 20 reusable packages are in permanent rotation.

To ensure that people living on the bridges as well as residents along the bridges do not find the system on the bridges more expensive than supermarkets in the wider city area, they receive a start-up deposit credit on their bridge card in the deposit equivalent of 150 euros.

The background to the measurement is that it can be assumed that each person has approx. 20 packages in use per week. If they did not return any deposit packaging over a period of approx. 6 months, but kept it in their home, they could theoretically (26 weeks x 20) accumulate 520 returnable packages there. Assuming an average deposit value of 30 cents per package, someone could hoard packaging for 156 euros before being forced to return it to the cycle: This is because once the deposit credit is used up, one must pay the real deposit for all reusable packaging with every purchase. But if you have always returned most of it undamaged to the cycle, the deposit credit is always replenished.

Everything that is booked on the bridge card over and above the €150 starting credit can be paid out in cash - except for the initial bonus, which can only be "used up".

35,000 bridge residents produce over 20,000 tons of waste per year - with bridge visitors and businesses, it's likely to be almost double that: The Renomat system can only handle part of it - for the rest there is another innovative solution: pneumatic waste disposal tubes

A large part of conventional packaging is eliminated through the system of reusable f glass and metal containers as well as pure PE packaging in the Renomats. However, plastic packaging of products purchased outside the Frankfurt Bridges and their neighbourhoods, paper waste and organic waste as well as residual garbage will remain until the nationwide roll-out of the bridges’ packaging system in the distant future. For these four categories of waste, a system of pneumatic tubes is to be installed, to which public waste garbage cans as well as waste bins on the bridge-properties will be connected. These tubes will suck the waste from the garbage cans (like pneumatic mail tubes) and transport it to large containers, where it will be compacted so that the filled containers can be taken away.

In order to dispose of the four types of waste (residual waste, foreign packaging waste, organic waste and paper waste) separately, you do not need several separate pipes, but valve flaps on the downpipes of the waste garbage cans are controlled in such a way that across the entire bridges, the valve opens towards the main pipe for only one type of waste at a time and the waste is sucked away

Accordingly, , the waste arrives separated in batches at the large container receiving stations, which are mainly located on the east arm of the Frankfurt Bridges in the immediate vicinity of the FES: It is then compacted there per container to be taken to the appropriate FES processing sites

New York's final case study of this project from 2019 concludes that this waste system can save nearly half of all costs (primarily energy and labor costs) as well as significant amounts of CO2

The savings from eliminating garbage trucks, personnel, and also mitigating congestion on the roads stands to reason. In addition, however, there is a special sustainability effect due to a separate pneumatic pipe for biowaste - be it catering waste, takeaway leftovers or the organic waste from households: The biowaste is piped to small biogas plants at the ends of the bridge arms for energy recovery. According to the calculations of the New York study, the resulting electricity can cover the energy required for the pneumatic system and its control units. For the Frankfurt Bridges, it would be necessary to analyze or simulate in the course of the preliminary planning to what extent this effect can also be achieved for them.

Special solutions must also be developed for sturdy paper and cardboard

A high volume of online shopping is to be expected on the Frankfurt Bridges, and with it considerable quantities of cardboard and cardboard waste. Having them removed by personnel on the bridges and then transported by elevators to the ground level to paper containers (as it is still the case with waste on the NY Highlines) is costly and energy-intensive. Nor can they be easily disposed of in appropriate waste containers in the pneumatic tube system, where they cannot be smoothly extracted, but must first be shredded. For this purpose, shredders are installed at regular intervals on the bridges. Half of these shredders are sunk into the substrate, and are thus not very high and do not take up much space: The cardboard shredded there can then also be transported through the pneumatic main tube to the disposer at the ends of the bridge arms.

However, the pneumatic drop tubes of the Frankfurt Bridges differ from those of the NY Highline in two respects

(1) They are not simply hung visibly under the bridges, but are integrated in an aesthetically pleasing way, and

(2) they only serve the Frankfurt Bridges: Neighbouring buildings will not be connected as well, since they are too many meters (at least 7m) away from the bridge corpus of the Frankfurt Bridges (unlike the NY Highline) - even at the narrowest points.