Foodist: Styrofoam Takeout Containers Are Killing Us All (Maybe)

TKWU, my favorite Chinese restaurant, doesn’t use Styrofoam takeout containers, but our favorite burger place does, and so do loads of other local restaurants, as well as local food carts. Takeout orders at TKWU are packaged in durable plastic containers which we hoard. The black plastic containers are roomy, tough, and dishwasher safe. We have a stack of them, along with equally durable lids, stashed in a cupboard over the stove. To be sure, they won’t last 500 years. Styrofoam on the other hand does last hundreds of years, and that is why  Burlingame, California’s City Council recently banned food vendors from selling prepared food in polystyrene-based food containers, the packaging popularly known as Styrofoam. San Mateo county’s environmental health director Dean Peterson told the San Francisco Examiner recently that, “Our biggest concern is that it never degrades … it never goes away.” Polystyrene is not biodegradable; it doesn’t break down naturally. Peterson told the Examiner that, Styrofoam breaks down into smaller and smaller bits of styrene, which eventually find their way into the food supply as wildlife mistakes them for food.

Think about that the next time you toss out a Styrofoam coffee cup at school or work.

The California cities of Millbrae and San Francisco already have bans in place concerning the use of styrofoam by food vendors. The ban may go statewide thanks to Alan Lowenthal a Democratic state Senator from Long Beach, California. Senator Lowenthal introduced SB 568 in February of 2011. If the bill were to make its way into law, it would ban the use of  polystyrene-based food containers across California by 2013.

On May 18, 2011 the City Council of Half Moon Bay, California passed an ordinance that requires “all containers be made of reusable, recyclable, compostable and/or biodegradable materials,” according to a piece published in the local newspaper. Just a few days earlier, Hermosa Beach, a community near Los Angeles rejected a proposed ban on polystyrene-based food containers. The proposal, submitted to the Hermosa Beach, California City Council on May 11, 2011, “would have prohibited restaurant owners from using food containers made of polystyrene,” according to a piece published in the Daily Breeze, the city’s newspaper. Councilman Michael DiVirgilio wants his city to become the first carbon neutral municipality in Southern California. He opposed the ban, however. DiVirgilio told the local paper, “I don’t think a ban is the right approach. This is not going to solve the problem….Things like bans have given environmentalism a bad name. We don’t want to attack people, we want to find ways to work with them. We should be proud if we can one day say we eliminated Styrofoam without having to ban it.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has listed polystyrene as a possible carcinogen. A report done by the EPA on solid waste rated the polystyrene manufacturing process as a major generator of hazardous waste nationwide.

The move to ban polystyrene-based food containers began in Oregon. Portland, Oregon banned the use of polystyrene food containers in 1990. Seattle banned the use of Styrofoam beginning in January 2009, and according to the city’s web site, “By July 1, 2010, all food service products designed for one-time-use must be replaced with one-time use products that are either compostable or recyclable. In addition, businesses that have customer dining area disposal stations where customers discard single use packaging must collect recyclable and compostable packaging in clearly labeled bins and send to a recycling or composting facility for processing.” Beginning July 1, 2011 the ban extends to utensils, straws, small portion cups, and foil faced, insulated wrap.

The American Chemistry Council released the results of a study in March of 2011 that concluded that the use of polystyrene was actually preferable to the use of corn based plastics, because polystyrene foam cups and plates use less energy and water than paper or corn-based alternatives. According to a piece that summarizes the findings of the study posted to the web by PR Newswire, “The polystyrene foam products create less, similar or more solid waste by volume than alternatives depending on the product and its weight, according to the study, and greenhouse gas emission comparisons vary widely, based on uncertainties over whether paper-based products degrade after disposal….The study’s authors found that lower weight products with similar functionality – such as polystyrene foam products composed of more than 90% air – generally produce smaller environmental burdens.”

Of course, that March 2011 study was prepared for the Plastics Foodservice Packaging Group of the American Chemistry Council, and the “peer reviewed” study does not utter a word about the environmental and health impacts of polystyrene. Oops.

The closest such a ban has come to Ann Arbor is Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago. There, according to a December 2010 piece in the Chicago Tribune, “The community’s environmental commission has recommended banning polystyrene, commonly referred to by its trademark name, Styrofoam.” Highland Park did not approve the ban, but had it done so it would have been the only town in the Midwest to have done so.

In Ann Arbor, there is a fee for recycling polystyrene, and the collected materials must be driven to the Drop-Off Station operated by Recycle Ann Arbor. An unlimited annual pass to use the station the three days per week it’s open costs $75.00. This cost is in addition to the 2.467 mills ($400-$600 per year per household) taxpayers pay for refuse collection, part of which funds the $1.3 million dollars taxpayers pay each year to Recycle Ann Arbor for recycling collections under the auspices of a recently approved 10-year, no-bid contract.

A staffer who works at the facility where Ann Arbor’s recycling is sorted confirmed that in the months since single-stream recycling was implemented more polystyrene is finding its way into recycling bins.

“The drivers can’t see what gets dumped into the truck from the bins. Used to be if someone put out materials that like, the driver could leave a tag, a note.”

When asked what staffers who sort the recycling do with the Styrofoam that finds its way into the recycling that is collected curbside the same staffer said, “Some gets recycled, sure. A lot gets tossed into the garbage. It’s all garbage, right?” joked the staffer. “One bin for everything.”