The Facts
Benefits of reuse:
Elevates the dining experience
Saves businesses money
Saves taxpayers and the city money
Reduces litter, plastic pollution, and carbon emissions
Creates new business opportunities and green jobs
Lowers exposure to toxic chemicals that are found in disposable foodware
What a reuse ordinance does
A reuse for onsite dining policy helps our city make the leap from single-use to reuse. When passed, it will make it so that when you sit down to eat at a restaurant, you will be served on real plates, cups and cutlery - no more single-use for dining in.
But what about take-out? The good news is that it also helps pave the way for entrepreneurs to create jobs by providing reusable to-go cups and containers to restaurants for takeout and food delivery.
Why compostables and bioplastics aren’t the answer
We know that brown paper take-out box and the bioplastic fork seem better for the environment. After all, it says “compostable” on them.
But unfortunately, when we substitute one single-use product for another, we’re often out of the frying pan and into the fire. There are big commercial interests trying to harness the public’s outrage over single-use plastics and push it to single-use something else. Products like paper to-go boxes and bioplastic cutlery often require more energy, water and toxic chemicals to produce than single-use plastics. What’s more, they usually don’t effectively compost, and many composters don’t want them because they degrade the value of the compost.
The good news is that reuse wins every time, and we can create systems that get people what they want without all the waste.
Why recycling won’t save us either
It feels so good to put recyclables in the blue cart, right? But unfortunately, plastic pollution won’t be solved by recycling. For one thing, almost all the high pollution plastic products we find in the environment - pretty much everything besides soda and water bottles - have no value in today’s recycling systems. People can’t make money off them and so they don’t collect it.
As a result, only about 9% of plastic packaging gets recycled. And, even the plastics that do have value still get littered. Plastic bottles, which do have economic value are still among the top 10 most littered items in beach debris studies. So focusing on making plastics more recyclable doesn’t mean that they won’t end up in the environment. But we can do better - by getting rid of the unnecessary single-use waste when we sit down to eat, and by helping foster new businesses in creating reusable take-out services.