At this historic Seattle cinema, reusable cups are stealing the show.
When the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) acquired the historic Seattle Cinerama Theatre, which had been closed since the 2020 pandemic, they had an eye on the future.
They reopened it as SIFF Cinema Downtown, and started looking at ways they could reduce their waste.
“We projected out what one year of single-use cups was going to look like,” says SIFF Cinema’s Operations Manager, Christa Lynn Luckenbach, “and it’s around 2,000 cups a week, whether that’s alcohol or fountain soda or our hot cups. Those were all single use.”
“We wondered, ‘What opportunities do we have to manage that waste, and possibly even decrease it?’”
SIFF Cinema not only shows movies all year long, they also host one of the largest film festivals in North America, with over 150,000 attendees watching hundreds of films from across the globe.
Attendance has grown every year, and so has the amount of waste from single-use serveware. They wanted to mitigate their environmental impact.
Stopping waste before it starts
“Those projections really amplified our concern about our role in creating waste,” says Andrea Stuart-Lehalle, SIFF Cinema’s COO. “So we wondered, ‘What opportunities do we have to manage that waste, and possibly even decrease it?’”
The cinema decided to join the City of Seattle and Seattle Public Utilities in their “Reuse Seattle” initiative, which has kept over a million single-use cups, bowls, and plates out of landfills.
“We want to prevent waste in the first place.”
“What we’re really focused on is waste prevention,” says Ashima Sukhdev, the climate policy advisor for Seattle Public Utilities. “We want to prevent waste in the first place, and reuse is a critical part of that strategy.”
An easy solution that’s making a difference
SIFF Cinemas then turned to r.World, whose reusable cups have now replaced the 100,000 single-use cups that organizers projected would have been discarded annually.
“We pick up all the used cups daily,” says r.World’s Beau Myers. “Then we bring them back to our industrial wash hub, where we wash and sanitize the cups, then do a quality inspection before we bring them back to the venue for circulation. And it’s not just the cups, it’s the lids too.”
“It’s not just the cups, it’s the lids too.”
Now as Seattlites wash down this theater’s legendary chocolate popcorn with an ice-cold drink, they’ll be more mindful of the single-use waste crisis—and what they can do about it.
“I hope people in our theaters are holding a cup in their hand thinking, “Huh, this is reusable,’” says Andrea. “And I hope they wonder: What are some other spaces in my life where I’m not using reusable materials. How else can I be a part of this change?”
r.World reusables have been so successful at the downtown location, that they’ve been implemented across all of SIFF Cinemas’ locations throughout Seattle as well.
