Wasted at Work
New Yorkers order a breathtaking amount of take out from fast-casual eateries every work day. Most if not all food generated by chains such as Chop’t, Sweetgreens, Taim or Dig Inn, is packaged in a plastic bowl or a waste-fiber clamshell container.

As for the compostable waste-fiber container, NYC’s residential composting program was put on hold and has barely restarted since the coronavirus rode into town. Composting at commercial or office sites isn’t part of the City’s program, and the overwhelming majority of NYC offices don’t have a compost bin anyway.
If an employee wishes to recycle that waste fiber container, he would need to carry it to a composting site on his own steam. On-the-job training rarely extends to scraping our plates for our planet’s future.
And so our landfills heave with packaging waste even before our post-lunch slump has a chance to kick in.
Super Bowl Every Day
The Food and Beverage Association and/or our local government could help the lunch bunch replace this toxic single-use menu item by creating a prototype for a standardized, reusable, clasp-lid bowl made from ceramic, aluminum or enamel. See tiffin or henkelmann carriers for inspiration and for proof that natural substances are an option in lieu of hard plastic.
After eating, you simply throw the bowl into the dishwasher, because, while offices may not have compost bins, they generally do have dishwashers. Failing access to that modern convenience, you could hand wash and dry while waiting for someone to brew the afternoon coffee. Next day, you bring your clean bowl back and get it refilled at the same place or at one of the other to-go places in your feeding radius.
Reusable standardized containers would reduce our lunch footprint.
Businesses can signal their participation in the program with an industry mark in the window and a stack of standardized containers at the ready. A consumer’s one-time purchase of the new bowl could be sweetened with a half-priced meal, free drink or feel-good badge. Perhaps the badge doubles as a decal to identify which bowl is yours in an office of bowl-carrying colleagues. Or the eatery could attach a unique key at the time of purchase.
Participating businesses could slap their own logo on the container as an evergreen promotion to absorb the costs of offering the bowl for free with a meal or help subsidize the cost of the bowl to the consumer. Our own workplaces could get in on the program by forgoing this year’s missized branded fleece holiday gift for a Company X logo’d bowl instead.
The container dimensions and weight are standard and therefore knowable. So participating eateries can price based on individual content or overall weight, similar to the salad-bar method used by supermarkets and delis. Reusable container servings could sell for slightly lower than one-use bowls to encourage program participation and to honor the savings a business realizes over time with the reduction in food packaging expenses.
Bodegas and supermarkets could join the program too. The more businesses that participate, the more packing a Super Bowl becomes integral to our daily routine.
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robin rusch