Reducing Pollution from Restaurant Delivery: Cities Need to Step Up
One of the many unfortunate side effects of COVID-19 has been the continued proliferation of single-use culture. Disposable masks, latex gloves, and chemical wipes fill garbage cans and litter the streets before ending up in landfills. Similarly, widespread use of restaurant delivery platforms during lockdown has continued to increase the number of single-use take-out containers that end up in the trash. With global restaurant delivery sales projected to rise to over $70 billion by 2022, this problem is only going to get worse.
Only municipal governments have the power to implement an enduring solution that reduces the pollution created by restaurant delivery. In doing so, they have the opportunity to create jobs, generate investment, and become stewards of sustainability.
In spite of the best intentions of eco-minded restaurant delivery customers, most take-out and delivery waste is not recycled — even if is placed in the correct recycling bin. So-called compostable containers, which have gained popularity among certain restaurants, are generally not recyclable and do not compost in a landfill.
In birth and death (and/or rebirth), single-use containers are pollutive: plastic containers are made from fossil fuels; the factories that manufacture them use fossil fuels; their transportation to restaurants from overseas factories, as well as to their eventual resting place in landfills, requires fossil fuels (New York City sends most of its waste to landfills ~300–400 miles away); in landfills and incinerators, they create toxic waste. The recycling process itself consumes fossil fuels, as plastics are melted down and shipped to overseas buyers.
The only way to eliminate restaurant delivery waste is to implement a circular (i.e. reusable) solution, and the only way for a circular solution to work at scale is for it to be convenient, low cost to customers and restaurants, embrace the highest standards of sanitation, and demonstrate accountability. Unfortunately, the private sector is not equipped to deliver such a solution. The amount of infrastructure, stakeholder management, and regulation required, along with limited revenue potential from restaurants or customers, suggest a money-losing proposition for would-be entrepreneurs.
For municipal governments, however, developing a circular solution would create jobs and generate investment.
For an example of what a circular solution might look like in a large global city, consider the Dabbawala network in Mumbai — where millions of re-usable tiffin containers are picked up from residences and restaurants in the morning, delivered to workers at lunchtime, and then picked up and returned to the residence or restaurant from which they came.
Imagine that your next restaurant delivery order arrives in a re-usable container. When you are finished eating, you rinse out the container and place it not in the recycling bin, but in a new “green” bin. The green bin is picked up daily, and the used containers are transported to one of several cleaning and sanitation centers throughout the city in which you live. The sanitized containers are then transported back to the restaurants that need them.
The implementation of such a solution would involve standardizing the types of take-out containers used by restaurants, manufacturing high quality versions of these containers that can be re-used several hundred times, implementing “green” bins throughout cities, developing new carting routes to pick up used containers, memorializing sanitization standards, constructing cleaning centers where used containers are cleaned according to these standards, and leveraging existing delivery networks to transport sanitized containers back to the restaurants that need them.
Each of these activities would create new jobs; many of these jobs would be suitable for individuals without university degrees. Cities could improve the financial prospects of restaurants, by removing the cost of procuring single use containers. Similarly, the implementation of “green bins” would reduce the amount of money spent by landlords and city workers on sorting garbage. In New York City, for example, a circular solution such as the one above would significantly reduce the hundreds of tons of solid waste collected each day and divert millions of containers from landfills each month.
In addition to the savings they would generate, the cost of such programs could be further offset by sponsorships (similar to bike share sponsorship programs in cities such as New York and London) and/or by partnering with private sector companies eager to impress their increasingly eco-conscious shareholders with cutting-edge ESG initiatives.
Risks to a sustainable circular solution include public squeamishness and damage and/or theft. The former can be overcome through enforcement of the highest cleaning standards, as well as marketing and education (and a reminder that we seem to have no problem with reusable tableware when dining out). The latter can be mitigated with the right incentives.
In today’s world, restaurant delivery pollution may seem like a champagne problem. But as environmental concerns once again take a back seat to corporate and political cronyism (at least here in the US), municipal governments need to step up and lay the groundwork for the future their citizens deserve.
