How you can take a bite out of your carbon footprint.
Eating outside of your home generally requires three things: food, food containers, and food utensils. For the majority of Americans, oil is involved in all three of these components. Food, especially processed food, requires tremendous amounts of oil to grow, process, and transport it. The plastic food containers we use are made from oil. Likewise, the great majority of our disposable forks, spoons, and knives are made from petroleum-based plastics.
The plastic forks and spoons we eat with are not recyclable, so what happens to all of these discarded utensils? They end up in our landfills, beaches, and oceans. Americans toss out enough plastic spoons, knives, and forks each year to circle the equator 300 times. Wanton wastefulness doesn’t stop with our flatware of course. According to the EPA, the United States produces approximately 220 million tons of garbage each year, the equivalent of burying more than 82,000 football fields six feet deep in compacted garbage. The National Recycling Coalition reports that, on average, every American throws away more than seven pounds of garbage a day.
With increased awareness of global warming, more and more people are realizing that long-term consequences can outweigh temporary convenience. After all, the average plastic fork is only used for three minutes before it’s thrown away. Three minutes of usefulness leads to 10,000 years in a landfill or a swirling eternity in an ocean gyre.
The situation is far from palatable, which is why Stephanie Bernstein founded To-Go Ware. Her Berkeley-based company makes bamboo utensil sets and stainless steel food tins to help reduce our reliance on oil and to cut down the amount of garbage we produce everyday. By eating your lunch out of a tiffin—a stackable metal tin that resembles a chromed vertical farm—you eliminate oil-based plastic containers along with the BPAs and phthalate toxins that can leach out of these soft plastics and into our food.
To-Go Ware chose to craft its utensils from bamboo because bamboo is a sustainable grass that “can grow from one to three feet in a single day. It is incredibly hardy and does not require fertilizers and pesticides to thrive. Unlike wood, it is nonporous and naturally antibacterial because of the seal of its cellular structure.”
– from good.is By Adam Starr