Waste Tracking Assignment

Since I rarely cook for myself, every week I eat a lot of takeout or delivery food. It is easy, convenient, and delicious. After a week of tracking my waste output, I realized that a considerable amount of food packaging was thrown away. Indeed, Americans consume a large amount of take-out food. According to Statista, 20% of those surveyed in 2016 ordered delivery food at least once a week. The amount of plastic generated by single-serve utensils, containers, straws, and bags that are given away by takeout restaurants is tremendous. About 40 billion plastic utensils are used in the United States every year.

 

    These numbers are increasing, especially with the rise of food delivery apps like GrubHub, Ubereat, Doordash, and Postmates. A lot of useless trash is created because of overpackaging in food delivery. For instance, do you really need the napkin and the plastic utensils when you are at home? Furthermore, consumers usually do not consider to reuse the food containers and utensils because most people hate washing dishes. These single-serve items can just go into the garbage cans without worrying to clean them. But this kind of mindless consumption has a significant impact on climate change, and these plastic items Normally can take up to 1000 years to decompose. Instead, restaurants can consider using mycelium packaging, which is made of a part of fungi and biodegrades thousands of times faster than plastic. Aluminum carryout containers could also eliminate the need for plastic ones. Unlike materials such as cardboard and paper, containers made of sustainable aluminum can be recycled even if it had been contacting with grease. They are both safe, inert, renewable, and natural material with the advantage of low cost, and thus they could be sustainable alternatives for regular materials like cardboard and plastic.

 

    Moreover, there is usually only one single compartment in a take-out food container, so different dishes are placed in separate containers. However, if the food container is designed to have at least two compartments, it could avoid the waste of extra new containers.

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