Tips for Recycling Delivery & Takeout

One of the emerging ways restaurants are staying in business during the coronavirus pandemic is home delivery of meals. Partnering with UberEats and GrubHub services, businesses serving food now serve it to people in their homes. The upsurge of home delivery resulting from the coronavirus pandemic means that home delivery is likely to remain a profitable business line for restaurants long after the pandemic is a bitter memory.

One problem related to the rise of home-delivered meals is that of packaging. Without due regard to creating packaging that can be put in a recycling bin, the proliferation of home delivery could create a new trash source that would clog landfills and thus harm the environment. That fact suggests using packaging materials such as cardboard or other material that can easily go into a recycling bin.

Another approach, described in a recent Forbes article, is to use a new form of packaging made of plant-based fibers, derived from agricultural waste, that has plastic characteristics but is compostable. In communities that provide food waste collection for compost, this packaging can be included in the appropriate bin, preventing it from going to a landfill or undergoing expensive and sometimes energy-intensive recycling processes. Homeowners who use compost for organic gardening could use packaging from their home-delivered food for that purpose. In a way, using compost is a form of recycling.

It would behoove a food business to use recyclable or compostable packaging and to advertise that fact to better brand itself as an environmentally responsible enterprise. In that way, customers who care about preserving and improving the Earth’s environment would be more likely to choose a business that uses recyclable or compostable food packaging than those businesses that cling to the standard plastic or Styrofoam.