Food-lovers want to support their favourite restaurants, but are worried about the amount of waste they're generating
Times are undoubtedly tough on the F&B scene right now, and those of us with the privilege of enjoying our time at home are finding ourselves with a very first-world dilemma—while we want to support our favourite restaurants by ordering take-out, transporting food creates inordinate amounts of waste.
While it seems superfluous to be discussing environmental concerns while a deadly pandemic sweeps across the world, remember that zoonotic outbreaks are the result of our interaction with the environment. Now is the time to be more conscious of our footprint on Earth, not less.
If you’re picking up your own takeaway, reducing packaging waste is relatively easy—simply bring your own reusable containers. Start with what you already have at home instead of going out to buy new ones. Make sure they’re spotless and dry before you head to the restaurant, and check with the restaurant in advance that they’re accepting reusables.
Things get more complicated when ordering in. At the moment, single-use containers are our only option. While some restaurants are using containers made from home compostable, commercially compostable, biodegradable, or “plant-based” materials, it should be noted that at the moment, it is near-impossible for a regular diner to dispose of any of this packaging responsibly—distributors of these products do not have any downstream processes in place to ensure their proper collection and processing. As a result, most of these containers are thrown out with general waste, and sit in landfill just the same.
Without the right conditions (such as exposure to specific amounts of oxygen and heat), usually provided by specialist machinery, these single-use items are incapable of breaking down as promised. Worse still, as there is currently no legislation around the labelling of these materials, some products marketed as “degradable” might break down into microplastics, which end up polluting our waterways and entering our bodies through drinking water. Many “bioplastics” are not biodegradable at all. A study by the University of Newcastle, Australia estimates that we each ingest about a credit card’s worth of plastic on a weekly basis. We also need to consider that farming the materials (such as corn, beets, sugarcane) used to make these containers could well be contributing to the destruction of forests and monoculture farming, has a raft of environmental consequences, including driving out wildlife (a key factor in zoonotic diseases).