The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Jared Entwistle is a graduate student studying ecology and environmental sciences and business administration at The University of Maine. This column reflects his views and expertise and does not speak on behalf of the university. He is a member of the Maine chapter of the national Scholars Strategy Network, which brings together scholars across the country to address public challenges and their policy implications. Members’ columns appear in the BDN every other week.
In April 2020, and for the third time in a week, my roommates and I reviewed the list of restaurants still open for takeout service. We were hungry and the local grocery store had been emptied of our favorite Friday night foods for weeks. As a household that tries to be conscious of our environmental and economic impact, this presented a dilemma: helping out local restaurants by ordering takeout also meant we would likely send several containers to the landfill.
For many of us, convenience and a sense of comradery won out in this dilemma. Prior to the pandemic, we would have reused the takeout containers, but increased calls to our local eateries overwhelmed our storage abilities. Reflecting on this has made me wonder “if a restaurant can reuse a plate, why can’t they reuse a takeout container?” For that matter, why can’t all packaging be reused?
The first few months of the pandemic produced a massive amount of trash. While some noticed the build-up in their houses, others noticed it on the streets. But the largest disruptions hit municipalities, where certain districts noticed waste increases as high as 50 percent.
In Maine, the pandemic has posed a particular challenge to our waste reduction goals and distracted us from our hierarchy of methods to reduce waste. Yet, according to Maine’s 2021 Generation and Disposal Capacity Report, per capita waste generation was growing even before the lockdowns. This was partly due to China’s so-called “National Sword” policy, which highlighted the inherent issues of single-sort recycling as much of that material was rerouted to local processors, who struggled to keep up.
Additionally, takeout and online purchases increased by 15 percent leading into 2020. Tragically, we were already heading towards a 50 percent increase in waste, the pandemic just got us there faster.
While a lot of attention has been paid to the lower end of the waste hierarchy (recycling and composting) by finding compostable or biodegradable plastics, there are problems with these solutions. The first issue is that these strategies won’t reduce the amount of waste, but simply replace one waste material for another. This wouldn’t be such an issue if it weren’t for the fact that many of these “green” packaging products aren’t any better for the environment and don’t break down as intended.
Recently, reusable packaging systems have started to rise in popularity. Reusable packages have been used in shipping and manufacturing to good success, providing proof that we have the technology and materials to implement reusable systems safely and effectively. So why haven’t we? While durable products that can be reused do take more resources to produce, the ability to reuse a package, even just a few times, causes its per-use environmental impact to be much less than the equivalent amount of disposable packaging.
There are other challenges, too. The food service industry and local governments will need to adopt updated food safety protocols, ensuring containers are reused safely. Customers will need to participate in the return process. Our mindset towards packaging will need to shift.
But — if enough of us takeout aficionados participate — we can significantly reduce food packaging waste. In total, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 23 percent of American waste is made up of disposable packaging, a large portion of which is food containers. If we all had the option to transition from a consumer into an active patron earlier in the pandemic, maybe we wouldn’t have seen such an uptick in waste creation. For my part, it would definitely have made ordering out less of a dilemma knowing that the packaging I was using wouldn’t wind up as somebody else’s problem.