Behold!

BizeeBoxBehold!

I live in New York, and I do not eat out or order in that often. And yet, accumulating in my kitchen cabinets, taking up space I do not have to spare, is a pile of plastic take-out containers of all shapes and sizes. I don’t know which of the lids go to which containers, which makes them basically useless — but I try to reuse them, and I try to avoid getting more, and yet here they are. Eventually, I throw them away. It’s not a great system.

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A company called BizeeBox has a better idea: reusable take-out boxes. The BizeeBox system goes like this: You get your delivery or takeout. You eat the food. And then you drop the box in some sort of conveniently located collection bin. Someone else washes it, and ships it back out. It ends up in someone else’s fridge. The boxes don’t accumulate endlessly in cabinets across the city, until they end up inevitably in the trash. They move. They cycle through.

FastCoExist reports that this system has been proven to work in a smaller, more closed system — a student café at the University of Michigan. But the company wants to expand through Ann Arbor and eventually come here, which could be a genius plan. Hell, given how much take-out New Yorkers eat, this should be a municipal utility.