FC United of Cambridge

Americans have gone from eating 72 take out meals per year to 127 meals per year between 1984 and 2006 (Pork Food Service and Sacbee). What happens to all the take out containers? The number of coffee cups Americans throw out each year would circle the globe 55 times (Greening Your Take-out Packaging).

Most of it is plastic or paper, and most of it gets thrown out. Some do get reused, others recycled, but it’s still a huge waste of resources.

The recent trend in greening food containers is to make them out of compostable materials: corn or sugar cane.

It turns out there are strict requirements to be called ‘compostable’, and some of the websites say the containers are biodegradable, others say compostable. From WorldCentric.org:

Compostable Plastic is plastic which is “capable of undergoing biological decomposition in a compost site as part of an available program, such that the plastic is not visually distinguishable and breaks down to carbon dioxide, water, inorganic compounds, and biomass, at a rate consistent with known compostable materials (e.g. cellulose). and leaves no toxic residue.” American Society for Testing & Materials (ASTM). In order for a plastic to be called compostable, three criteria need to be met:

Degradable Plastic is plastic which will undergo a significant change in its chemical structure under specific environmental conditions resulting in a loss of some properties. Please note that there is no requirement that the plastic has to be degrade from the action of “naturally occurring microorganism” or any of the other criteria required for compostable plastics.

Biodegradable may not be ideal, but it certainly sounds better than plastic sitting for years in a landfill. These containers, though, take energy to be made and transported, and neither corn nor sugar case is a benign crop (although a brief skimming of an article on sugar cane production makes it sounds less bad than I thought).

Ideally, people would buy a reusable container and ask for their take out food to be put in it:
But most people like the convenience of plastic containers and don’t want the hassle of carrying a container around with them at all times. If people can’t be bothered to carry around a cloth grocery bag that squishes into a small space, how can we expect them to carry around a bulky container that has to be washed after every use?

So what can a container be made of that can be reused, and what can it be reused for? I’ve been thinking about this all week, and it’s a tough question. It needs to be

• water proof
• heat resistant
• it should be able to be cleaned

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