Plastic fantastic
In 2012 when working near a large food court in Sydney it struck me just how much plastic waste was thrown away each lunchtime. Each bowl of noodles has the bowl, the lid, the chopsticks, the bag, the extra soy sauce packet… and so it went on. My colleagues and I produced a short video to describe what we had seen. We interviewed people in food courts, and did a quick guerrilla investigation at a Japanese restaurant to see if they would reuse a plastic bowl. Watch to see what happens:
Through observation and interviews we found a few challenges to good recycling practice at lunchtimes:
- People are time poor. Organising to bring lunch from home, or bring a container to be filled is perceived to take too much time.
- Poor recycling facilities. Although this has slightly improved in some food courts since we shot this video, the options are still relatively low.
- Confusing signage. People are often confused as to whether food containers are recyclable if dirty, or which section of the recycling they should put them into.
- Environment shapes behaviour. Fast-paced food courts may have some impact on people’s choices. The need to choose quickly often means people are getting things they don’t really need, like extra soy sauce packets or a plastic bag to hold everything.
Today there are around 500,000 workers in the Sydney CBD (ABS) serviced by around 30 food courts. That’s a lot of waste each day.
We ended the video with a question of how to reduce lunch waste from CBD workers. The answer? I often take a ceramic bowl to food courts to be filled (but I am just one person). I’ve also thought that some sort of returnable bowl scheme could work. But this would rely on people remembering to bring the bowl with them. In some interviews with people in food courts, many stated that they hadn’t worked out what they wanted to eat before they left the office. This means it would be difficult for them to pre-plan to bring a bowl.
The video concentrated on plastic waste, but there is also the question of organic waste from food (30% of our waste is food waste). Nowadays many outlets are using compostable materials for their containers. This is an improvement, but as we heard in the lecture in week 3, if the organic waste goes into regular landfill it can be a source of methane — an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Although food waste happens all along the supply chain, I feel it’s at the point of consumption where the general public has the most impact. The difficulty is that we’ve decided as a society that convenience is more important than the planet, and reducing our desire for convenience is a very difficult social change. That might be the subject of the next post.
