Landfills digest new plates faster

Environmentalists have complained for years about fast-food containers

When Annie and Jesse Hill shared a quick lunch of chicken and noodles at Sino Wok in Triangle Town Center, they noticed the food, not the plates.

But the plates were almost edible, too. Made of bamboo fiber and sugar cane pulp, they're totally biodegradable -- unlike most fast food containers.

"This is going to be the plate of the future," said Jesse Hill, 38, a construction worker from Garner as he examined what was beneath the heap of noodles. "If you take Styrofoam plates and put them in garbage cans, they take up too much space. This plate goes away."

Sino Wok International, a Greensboro-based chain of 10 Chinese and Japanese restaurants in shopping mall food courts in five states, is trying the bamboo plates as an environmentally friendly alternative to polystyrene.

The problem of disposable food containers has long been a sore spot in the fast-food industry. Environmentalists complain that the containers for the millions of burgers and chicken nuggets people consume each year litter roadsides and choke landfills. An estimated 438 billion disposable food and drink containers are used annually around the world, said Katherine Madison, a representative of Eatware, which manufactures the biodegradable plates used at Sino Wok.

The fast-food industry counters that its waste contributes a small fraction -- less than 1 percent, by one study -- of garbage hauled to dumps. Still, in the 1990s, McDonald's began using recycled products, reduced packaging and switched to paper wrappers from polystyrene for its Big Macs and other sandwiches.

And environmental pressures persist. Two California cities, San Francisco and Oakland, last year banned restaurants from using plastic foam containers to reduce the amount of slow-degrading materials deposited in landfills.

As a result, the quest for a better fast-food plate is gaining momentum, especially since the North American market for paper and plastic disposables is $8 billion to $12 billion a year, said John R. Burke, president of the Foodservice & Packaging Institute, a trade association.

The single-use dinnerware sold under the Eatware brand is manufactured in China by Glory Team Industrial and was recently introduced in the United States. The beige containers have the feel of Chinette-brand plates and bowls -- sturdy and less prone to soak up moisture -- but are not paper.

And unlike plastics-based containers, biodegradable plates break down in about six months, taking up less landfill space.

"I have kids too," Vincent Auyeung, 33, of Chapel Hill, president of Sino Wok International, said of his decision to try the new dinnerware. "I want to protect the environment. We throw away loads and loads of plates."

Sino Wok is the first restaurant to start serving food on the dinnerware. Auyeung said he had the plates at one restaurant and expects to expand to others in time. He said the environmental investment isn't cheap -- plates cost about 6 cents a piece, compared to 4 cents for polystyrene.

"We tried using paper, but the sauce just leaked out," Auyeung said.

Burke, with the trade association, said the biodegradable products are more expensive and still represent a tiny segment of the market but have expanded since biodegradable coatings produced from corn, sugar beets and sugar cane were introduced in recent years.

"It's very definitely a niche product," Burke said. "If there are food service operators that want to make a statement about their environmental concerns, they might turn to these products."