Photo courtesy of Jozette Moses.
Since the worldwide lockdown in March, the use of single-use plastic has skyrocketed due to disposable masks and gloves used to protect ourselves from COVID-19. Due to high demand of protective personal equipment (PPE), The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) estimates that the global market for disposable masks will total around $166 billion in 2020, which is up from around $800 million in 2019. Specifically in Wuhan (the origin of the COVID pandemic), hospitals produced “240 tons of single-use plastic-based medical waste” per day. Accordingly, if this observation holds true anywhere else, the United States “could generate an entire year’s worth of medical waste in 2 months.” However, there is one often overlooked component of daily life that is contributing to the massive use of plastic worldwide: restaurants and dining halls. Specifically at Connecticut College, when entering any dining hall on campus, the use of plastic is inevitable. You are given a plastic bag, a plastic container, plastic cups and multiple plastic utensils to choose from. For people who are more sustainably-conscious, it is difficult to avoid the huge heap of plastic when getting food.
As a matter of fact, countries were committed to putting a stop to the use of plastic and to finally move to more sustainable options pre-COVID. For example, 200 ministers at the United Nations Environmental Assembly (UNEA) agreed in the beginning of 2019 to significantly reduce the use of single-use plastics over the span of the next decade. Unfortunately, the United States was not on board with the proposal and aimed to weaken the text. However, these plans were put to a halt. Now when comparing the amount of waste produced in Thailand during “normal times,” there is a 15 percent increase, from 1,500 tons to 6,300 tons of plastic waste per day. Since people are encouraged to stay at home, more people are turning to plastic alternatives for safety as well as convenience, especially when ordering food for delivery or takeout. Unfortunately, the consequences are increasing plastic demand. For example, during Singapore’s 8-week lockdown, out of 1,100 residents from a survey, the use of plastic-packaged take-out meals and home-delivered groceries contributed to an additional 1,470 tons of plastic alone. That is equivalent to the weight of 92 double-decker buses. To make matters worse, in California, Governor Newsom lifted the plastic bag ban (established in 2016) in April over the concern that the virus can spread through reusable bags, putting a dent into sustainability efforts.
The issue of plastic waste also hits here at Connecticut College across the four dining halls open on campus. On Oct. 2nd in a Zoom meeting, I spoke with Ingrid Bushwack, director of Dining Services, about following state health guidelines and how that impacts sustainability efforts during a pandemic. When asked about the challenges that she faced when creating a new dining experience during a pandemic, Bushwack responded, “Every challenge you can imagine we faced.” One of the challenges mentioned was the transitioning period. “The current level of service that we are providing right now basically goes against everything that the dining department has worked over the last 10 years to actually accomplish and improve on as far as our offerings of food, how we offer the food, the level of service that we put into the college community.” I then asked Bushwack about the extent to which the dining halls have remained sustainably-conscious. “In the first 2-3 weeks where we had to package absolutely everything in advance, that was a little hard because each one of [the students] has different preferences with our food… so there is food waste and plastic waste combined. Since we have moved to the current system that we have been doing, coming in and picking what you want to go into the container, has greatly reduced the food waste.” Evidently, there has been a major improvement in the dining halls since dining halls moved to the current system, Bushwack notes “a 50% decrease in the amount of plastic containers that [dining halls] are purchasing right now” since the beginning of the semester. Moreover, Bushwack then went into detail about possible future projects to make getting meals more sustainable. “Part of the first step is that we need to have some more of the service restrictions loosened by the [state] health department and through state guidelines which so far really hasn’t happened too much… So for right now, it’s a little tough for us. We haven’t been doing a ton of planning yet.”
Over another Zoom meeting on Oct. 2nd, I spoke with Margaret Bounds, Assistant Director of Sustainability, about the Office of Sustainability’s possible involvement with working on sustainable alternatives in the dining halls. When asked about whether or not the concerns about the amount of plastic in the dining halls has been brought to her attention, Bounds responded that “the waste created by the packaging of takeout food, like the plastic containers and paper containers and what’s recyclable from that” and “the concern about how much food waste is being produced” has been brought to her attention by students. Bounds then went into detail about the extent that the Office of Sustainability has been in contact with Dining Services. Bounds responded, “We spoke with Dining over the summer. One of the issues that we partnered with them on is the reusable bags that are available now. I think that they had an issue getting them in time for the start of the semester so that is why there were plastic bags for a little while, but hopefully now students are picking up their reusable bags.” When asked if there a sustainable solution to get meals while keeping students and staff safe, Bounds responded, “We are working right now to get the water bottle filling stations to be turned back on so you will be able to fill your reusable water bottles in the library, Cro, and Fanning at those bottle fillers” as well as possibly “some tweaks in the packaging that [the Office of Sustainability is] looking at.”
Unfortunately, it seems that Connecticut College has little control over efforts to be sustainable right now due to the state guidelines as well as the health code, but there are still ways that students can change their individual actions to be more sustainable. I asked both Bushwack and Bounds about certain approaches that they would recommend for sustainably-conscious students to take when getting meals in the dining halls. Bushwack emphasized the importance that students should use a reusable bag. “Some students have brought their own reusable bags,” Bushwack continues to say, “The only other thing I could think of would be the better students are at having us package the hot food into one single container [rather than in multiple containers], then there are less of the disposable containers going into the trash.” From Bounds, she suggests making sure that “you are only taking the food that you are actually going to eat and then when you are done, disposing of the packaging properly. The plastic clamshell containers are recyclable as long as you empty them of food so if you can sort of go through and separate the packaging, that’s a key one.”
For now, it seems that using plastic on a day to day basis will be unavoidable. In the long run, there is no way to be sure what this means for reusable items in the future. Due to the response of the pandemic, “the global plastic packaging market size is projected to grow from USD 909.2 billion in 2019 to 1012.6 billion by 2021.” Sydney Harris of the Plastisphere podcast (episode 8), believes that it will be a challenge to convert the consumers’ mind back to reusable products. Especially since reusable packaging has been associated as spreaders of COVID. Harris states, “those kinds of social norms are very hard to undo-it took a very long time to get to where we were before the virus in terms of social acceptance of reusables.” Bounds shared these concerns with me in regards to dining on campus. “The way that I am trying to look at it is this year is obviously going to be a little bit of a step back in terms of waste goals, but we can maybe use this time to figure out some things in the future. Like, do we want to have composting in the future? Like we don’t have a ton of takeout on campus, but how can we make ‘grab and go’ better for the future when we reopen from Covid and make sure that we are not stuck with this sort of mode going forward.” Globally, things do not seem optimistic from a scientific standpoint, British scientists warn that in just 20 years, an estimate of 1.3 billion tons of plastic could end up in the environment, that amount of plastic could cover the area of the United Kingdom 1.5 times. However, there is some small form of hope; more and more companies across the world are aiming to become more green by decreasing their plastic waste and to learn to recycle properly, meaning that the EU’s goal (as referenced before) to make 10 million tons of plastic reusable by 2025 can still be achieved. As Bounds simply put it at the end of our interview, “It’s a tough time for waste for sure, but we are all doing the best that we can.”•
