For a year Children’s Choice has been packaging school lunches in compostable food trays, and is working to set up systems to get all the trays composted properly.
When the company switched to potato-based trays for its hot foods and bioplastic cold food trays last August, none of the 70 Bay Area schools it works with had a way to send the discarded trays to industrial composting facilities, said CEO and founder Justin Gagnon.
Children’s Choice, which started in 1992, cooks school lunches, puts them in the trays and seals them with plastic film.
The company developed the compostable tray over two years, investigating different materials and experimenting with different shapes. Molded fiberboard didn’t work because food would bond to the tray and the plastic seal didn’t hold well. Even the compostable trays didn’t perform the same as plastic trays; Gagnon said the compostable tray would get too soft in some areas, so they had to make it thicker on the corners.
Once the company ran out of plastic trays, it switched to the compostable option. “All of our schools had the product immediately,” Gagnon said. “Now what do you do?”
The company had gone through so much work actually trying to develop a compostable tray that it didn’t really focus on where the trays would go until the tray was a reality. Gagnon said he was surprised that none of the schools’ waste management companies did composting pickup, but by April, one school had a way to compost.
Allied Waste in San Mateo County, Calif., already had a commercial composting program, and Children’s Choice worked with the company and the county to have it pick up the composting from La Entrada school.
Children’s Choice is now in talks with waste companies in other areas to get schools set up with composting programs or find out what it takes to have composting facilities built. The schools the company works with mostly have private contractors, who say they need help getting support to build composting operations, Gagnon said.
He admits that parents questioned the switch when most of the trays ended up in the garbage. "At least we’re moving away from plastic-based materials," he said. "I'd like to see it all composted and close the loop."
The company is next looking at how to replace the plastic seal for the trays, looking for a film that is clear and can be heated. Bioplastic films exist for cold food trays, Gagnon said, but not yet for hot trays. |
