Mayor Bloomberg's promise to ban Styrofoam food packaging in his State of the City address drew jeers from the chemical lobby and opportunities for tabloid editors to point out that the mayor wasn't just banning the liquid in Joe Blow's morning Coolatta, but the whole damn thing! Yet the crucial factor for making any food container restriction effective came earlier in the mayor's speech: without increased recycling of plastics, a Styrofoam ban makes no sense.
Seattle, a city that banned polystyrene food containers ("Styrofoam" is actually a trademark of Dow Chemical, and is in insulation, not coffee cups ) in 2010, conducted a study before they passed their law. "What that study told us was that banning Styrofoam all by itself was a dumb idea, because the replacements all have a similar or greater environmental impact than Styrofoam," says Dick Lilly, the manager for solid waste prevention for Seattle Public Utilities.
Lilly points to items like #5 hard plastic clamshells that restaurants might use to replace polystyrene take-out boxes as being particularly bad for the environment. "You're obliged to take a longer look at the environmental impact of food packaging and then you need the support systems in place for a law to work. Otherwise, banning Styrofoam is just an environmental, knee-jerk reaction."
Seattle's solution was to ensure that they had the facilities to recycle hard plastics, and add a provision to the Styrofoam ban that mandated that all take-out food containers must be either recyclable or compostable.
In his address, Bloomberg noted that New York would begin recycling those lidded plastic octagons your $14 Pad Thai comes in, and all other hard plastics "this spring," when a new Sunset Park recycling facility opens. Deputy Commissioner for the Sanitation Department Ron Gonen now says that will happen this summer, but declined to give a date.
Currently Sanitation is able to recycle all paper food products, including pizza boxes and coffee cups, provided there is no food waste in them. "There's going to be a major outreach campaign coming out the next few months, and we're going to stress the importance of recycling to New Yorkers," Gonen said, which is good news because the DSNY's website is currently cryptic when it comes to determining what food packaging can or can't be recycled.
No proposed change in public policy is complete without hyperbolic warnings from a business lobby: last month the American Chemistry Council charged that a polystyrene ban in New York would cost the city and its residents $100 million.
"When the tobacco industry says, 'cigarette smoking is safe,' then you read that with an awareness of who is putting out the report," says Eric Goldstein, New York City's environmental director for the NRDC. "It costs taxpayers $300 million a year to export waste to out of state landfills, and if we can reduce those costs by recycling more, then taxpayers in New York will save money on every ton of waste that is composted or recycled." Additionally, it costs the city millions to separate polystyrene from other recyclable materials.
The chain that purports to Run America certainly wasn't happy with the mayor's proposal. “A polystyrene ban will not eliminate waste or increase recycling; It will simply replace one type of trash with another,” a Dunkin Donuts release blared shortly after Bloomberg announced the plan.
Gonen said that his department has met with Dunkin Donuts to discuss the change and added that he understands their concern. "But if you look at the 10 largest food service providers in New York, only two or three of them still use foam. It may hurt a few companies that are behind the times, but the majority of the business community already don't use foam."
Gonen added, "We as a city should be doing more to recognize businesses that are proactively helping New York City and the environment, and not protect the businesses that are trying to remain with a legacy product that is harmful for the environment."
Still, won't these paper or plastic products cost more at the register? "I doubt that customers ever notice a price increase," says Lilly. "Yes they are slightly more expensive, but the price difference has dropped dramatically because there are more recyclable or compostable products on the market."
The amount of waste that New York recycles has dipped dramatically during Bloomberg's tenure, from 23% in 2001 to the current rate of 15%. In his most recent State of the City address, the mayor promised a goal of 30% by 2017, helped in part by ramping up the city's fledgling composting program.
Currently 65 public schools participate in a pilot composting program, which Gonen says will be expanded to 100 by the end of the year, and all schools by 2014 or 2015. And in May, Sanitation will debut a curbside composting pilot in Staten Island, where single family homes will be able to set out a separate container of biodegradable waste. Gonen says the goal is to expand the pilot to all five boroughs in two years.
"With composting, New York is much more complex than other cities because our housing stock is very diverse, so we're going to learn a lot along the way," Gonen says, adding that his department has sought advice from officials in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco, all cities with robust organics programs that banned polystyrene.
Lilly said that since the ban was enacted in Seattle, polystyrene has "pretty much disappeared" from the city's waste stream. "[The ban] is an important thing to do, and New York should do it, because it would set a precedent for other East Coast cities. Just because it won't be perfect at the outset, doesn't mean you can't do it."
