Five companies made the return trip work. None of them sold proof.

The logistics arm of JD.com owns its warehouses, sorting centres and couriers — which is why it could run reverse logistics at all. Its Green Stream Initiative is the most complete corporate reverse-packaging system on record: reusable cold-chain boxes from 2015, a reusable box for ordinary goods from 2017 with more than 16 million uses across 30-plus cities, warehouse transfer bags at over 98% utilisation, and a courier-led carton take-back rewarded with points. JD and its brand partners reported cutting nearly 10 billion pieces of disposable packaging between 2014 and 2020.

It won for three reasons: every courier returns to a JD station anyway, so a box coming back costs almost nothing; it is a cost saving, not a charity; and it chose the easiest material — its own clean, standard packaging.

China's largest food-delivery platform owns no kitchens and no packaging; its waste arrives at homes it never enters. Its biggest win was behavioural — an opt-out for disposable cutlery in the app, which more than 70% of Shanghai's 1.2 million daily orders used. For physical take-back, riders could not simply carry dirty, mixed, low-value containers, so Meituan built around 350 community recycling sites with partners and universities; the best reached a 74% recycling rate, and collected plastic became bicycle parts and phone cases.

It won where the platform controlled the interface and stalled where return needed a physical place run by someone else.

An app-only supermarket that delivers with small electric vans on fixed routes at fixed times — the milk-run — to dense clusters of customers, across 690 cities with more than 1,000 electric vehicles. Because the same van visits the same street on a schedule, the return trip has a natural product: since 2020 Picnic drivers have carried parcel returns for other retailers, collecting almost half a million in 2025, and they take deposit bottles and cans from doorsteps — a record volume in 2025, nearly 50% more than Picnic itself sold, because the van is already there. 2025 revenue passed €1.9 billion with a net loss above €272 million; the Netherlands has reached profitability.

Launched at Davos with P&G, Unilever, Nestlé, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo: everyday products in durable containers against a deposit, empties collected from the doorstep by courier, cleaned and refilled. Loop expanded into stores — Tesco, Carrefour, Aeon, Kroger, Walmart delivery — reaching about 150 retail locations by the end of 2022, with roughly two-thirds of participants returning containers more than once. In early 2023 the standalone e-commerce service was wound down; Loop now lives as an in-store reuse programme, strongest in France and Japan.

It struggled because a courier making a special trip for empties has no forward delivery to share the cost with, and because deposits and behaviour change stayed niche.

Founded as a student venture, TerraCycle became the reference business for recycling hard-to-recycle waste — crisp packets, toothpaste tubes, coffee capsules — in some 20 countries including India. Its model is brand-sponsored recycling: the brand pays, the public mails or drops off at volunteer collection points, TerraCycle processes. It also sells consumer Zero Waste Boxes and recovered material.

In 2021 it was sued in California, with eight brands, over "100% recyclable" claims on programmes that were in fact capacity-limited; the settlement removed those labels and added enrolment-limit notices. Critics have questioned the effective scale of its programmes and their reliance on unpaid volunteers.