Food service businesses are primary generators of food waste streams worldwide. Quick service restaurants make up a large portion of meals served and rely heavily on disposable packaging for hygiene and consumer convenience. Unfortunately, these benefits come with high environmental consequences as food waste and packaging collectively contribute to more than ½ of solid municipal waste going into landfills and nearly ¼ of US methane emissions according to the EPA.
Though paper and plastics are both technically recyclable, once they become food-soiled and co-mingled with organics, the likelihood of either the packaging or organic materials being recycled is near zero. Some businesses are making efforts to help consumers source separate these categories by providing multiple recycling bins. However, even with the best labeled and oriented bins, the potential for cross contamination is still high enough to prevent reliable recycling. This can lead to “wish-cycling”, the phenomenon in which the best intentions up-stream can undermine their goal if the full system isn't considered.
Recycling is a business with relatively tight margins, so any additional processes required to sort and clean raw materials compromises financial viability and contamination can ruin their finished products. In addition, there is so much waste requiring management, that processors can refuse materials that don’t meet their standard, so those which don’t make the cut are likely re-directed to the landfill.
Considering the issues laid out above, it’s my opinion that creating effective systems to process co-mingled materials are key to addressing the problem at scale. This requires more attention further up the value chain to control inputs that will end up in the waste stream. Though this is not practical in every context, most post-consumer waste coming out of food service businesses is composed of the products they serve and therefore can be controlled. When disposable packaging must be used, the only viable option for value recovery after use is utilizing certified compostable products that can be co-processed with food waste.
Not all composters and compost processes are set up to accept packaging materials and not all “compostable/biodegradable” packaging is created equal, so the right combination of resources are required to ensure success. However proper implementation can make an enormous impact reducing two major waste streams while supporting resource recovery of both.
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