After finishing my coffee at a New York City Pret a Manger restaurant yesterday morning, I lingered near the trash bin, which was divided into separate sections with uniquely shaped openings -- not unlike a toddler’s shape-sorting block toy. In my hands: a napkin, a paperboard coffee cup, a cardboard sleeve, a plastic lid. It took me, something of a garbage geek, nearly a minute to figure out what I was supposed to do with each discard.
Did the napkin go with the paper, or did the napkin go with the food waste, which was bound for a composting operation beyond the city limits? (After all, paper is compostable, though experts say ‘tis a far better thing to make new paper from old, in places where recovery systems can handle potentially soiled paper, rather than to make compost from paper.)
Did the plastic lid go with the plastic recycling or into the compartment labeled “trash?" At home, the lid would have gone into the trash, as New York City’s Department of Sanitation, like many others, accepts only narrow-necked plastic bottles for curbside recycling. But businesses in New York hire private carters and so march to a different drummer. Pret a Manger uses Action Carting, a progressive company that collects food waste for composting and, I happened to know, a wider range of plastics for recycling.
I did, eventually, study the educational illustrations above the waste bins, which should have set me straight. But still I had trouble identifying the cup lid among so many different shapes. Maybe I need to go back to kindergarten and the block sorter. Or maybe the illustrations could be a little clearer. (Or perhaps the bins could have a built-in object recognition device: I hold before an electric eye my lid, empty fruit cup, or sandwich box, and a quiet, friendly voice tells me where to put it. I’d prefer a more parsimonious -- that is, less technological and less expensive -- fix, but what can I say? People do love their apps.)
I can't offer enough props to Pret for lightening its environnmental impact and nudging customers in the same direction. But my interlude at the waste bins tells me that we've got a ways to go down the path toward sustainable packaging (an ideal that ought to include no packaging). According to the EPA, packaging makes up nearly one third of municipal solid waste; between 1990 and 2007, containers and packaging have increased by nearly 14 million tons.
Pret a Manger, which works with environmental groups (like Global Green), packaging designers, waste haulers, paper mills, and composters to blunt the impact of its single-use packaging, and is still experimenting with the perfect receptacle, is leading the way. But peering inside the bins, where cups were mixed willy-nilly with “trash” and bottles were mixed with napkins, I wondered if the public really had the stomach to follow.
