Cheap and easily manufactured using existing processes and factories (pellets molded into various films and containers).
Very few restaurants want to pay a premium for the deluxe eco groovy stuff, in my experience (as a customer only, but one who frequents such stores). They're almost like a lifestyle / branding thing to go along with organic / vegetarian / sustainable / local themed restaurants, but most don't do that and just want to keep costs down. Most just use regular cheap plastic and some still use Styrofoam.
I think a bioplastic that actually biodegrades in average municipal landfills at a minimal cost markup vs current plastics, that say 40% of restaurants adopt voluntarily (or by regulation), will be more impactful than the boutique reusables we currently see but only at like one restaurant per thousand.
I don't ever see places like Walmart or Costco switching to wooden bowls, for example. But bioplastics that look and feel the same and only cost a few percentage more? Maybe. Especially if encouraged by local regulations, similar to plastic bag bans.
> Very few restaurants want to pay a premium for the deluxe eco groovy stuff, in my experience (as a customer only, but one who frequents such stores). They're almost like a lifestyle / branding thing to go along with organic / vegetarian / sustainable / local themed restaurants, but most don't do that and just want to keep costs down.
Restaurants can be perfectly sincere (and branding isn't incompatible with sincerity), but they have tight margins. It's their customers who really have the choice, and there are very few customers willing to pay extra for the eco stuff. It reminds me of this evergreen Onion article:
I'm not saying restaurants are insincere about it, just that it's a cost of doing business many won't (or can't) absorb. It's usually the more expensive hippie-tastic places with already-high prices (and hopefully higher margins) that can afford them.
Culturally, I don't think customers would accept a choice on the matter either, like I've never seen a place offer "you can have the plastic box for free, or buy the sustainable wooden one for $2". In lieu of that, I used to bring my own reusable tupperware to the restaurants for takeout, but got a looooooot of strange looks and comments about that. What I'd really love to see is more of a "borrow a tupperware, bring back a tupperware" model where they just loan you containers. I'd only ever seen that on college campuses, not in the real world.
Anyway, none of that is really the point. There's nothing wrong with fancy sustainable/reusable dishware, but something that's incrementally better and not much more costly than regular plastic is much more likely to see widespread adoption. I think the gradual phase-out of styrofoam to plastics is one such example, and cheap bioplastics of the less-biodegradable kind are more common now (though not everywhere), paperboard boxes with some wax paper/foil lining are popping up, some places are doing away with bottled plastic water in favor of water in milk-like cartons... gradual incrementalism seems to work better than revolutionary approaches in that industry.
At least Sulapac sells biodegradeable pellet etc. materials which can be used by existing machinery for PS, ABS, PC and PP plastics. Probably there are other ones, too.
In Sweden, the take-away food I tend to buy is always packed in a cardboard box or paper containers. Even the drink straws are cardboard in hamburger places. The drink cup is cardboard with some sort of biodegradeable (?) plastic surface inside. Basically all of that gets recycled into the cardboard bin.
Plastic food packaging is not so easy to find, at least in places I tend to visit. Even the dip sauces are packed in tiny cardboard containers. I guess some places still use styrofoam packs, but I have not visited those places in many years.
It varies a lot by location/jurisdiction, especially in a place like the US where our waste stream is a confusing mishmash of governments of different levels and various partnerships with private waste companies who end up outsourcing a lot of their recycling. Some places will allow bioplastics to be municipally composted at an industrial plant near the city. Rural places don't typically have such facilities and plastics just go in the trash to be landfilled. Other places just burn their trash in the backyard. And depending on the jurisdiction, there may or may not be any laws or regulations about any of this stuff. It's basically up to the states and local governments to decide for themselves, which means there's like hundreds of different variations across the country.
Very few restaurants want to pay a premium for the deluxe eco groovy stuff, in my experience (as a customer only, but one who frequents such stores). They're almost like a lifestyle / branding thing to go along with organic / vegetarian / sustainable / local themed restaurants, but most don't do that and just want to keep costs down. Most just use regular cheap plastic and some still use Styrofoam.
I think a bioplastic that actually biodegrades in average municipal landfills at a minimal cost markup vs current plastics, that say 40% of restaurants adopt voluntarily (or by regulation), will be more impactful than the boutique reusables we currently see but only at like one restaurant per thousand.
I don't ever see places like Walmart or Costco switching to wooden bowls, for example. But bioplastics that look and feel the same and only cost a few percentage more? Maybe. Especially if encouraged by local regulations, similar to plastic bag bans.