Burgerville is claiming these days that its cups and straws and straw wrappers are compostable. But does that mean I can throw them in my worm bin and they’ll turn into tomatoes? Sounds to me like corporate fiddle-faddle. I’d really like to get the skinny on this before planting season.
—Erik, Northwest neighborhood
Sorry, Erik, but you can’t plant those cups and wrappers in the ground and expect them to sprout vegetables. What Burgerville has instituted is “commercially compostable” packaging, meaning it must be processed by an industrial facility — not by the slimy inhabitants of your yard.
“There is confusion about that,” agreed Alison Dennis, the director of sustainable programs for Burgerville, which is based in Vancouver.
Here’s some clarity: Burgerville now uses plant-based materials for all its major packaging — the bags and sandwich wrappers, the straw sleeves, the cups and cup lids. Only a handful of minor items are prepackaged by other suppliers still using traditional materials, including foil ketchup packets and plastic tartar sauce containers, for example.
Burgerville is proud to be the first fast-food restaurant in the nation to have switched to entirely compostable or recyclable materials, Dennis said. Its “ecotainers” were developed by International Paper in conjunction with Coca Cola, which has high standards for sturdiness — and for anything it’s going to apply its brand to, she said.
If you’re a regular customer and you typically eat in, you already know that Burgerville has installed composting stations at its local restaurants. Everything you sort out there is collected and shipped to Cedar Grove Composting, a commercial facility in Everett.
Cedar Grove does what you presumably can’t do at home: cook the compost at 160 to 170 degrees Fahrenheit. That breaks it down in a matter of weeks. Plus, Cedar Grove welcomes the food waste that you can’t compost — meat scraps and grease, for example, that under normal backyard circumstances won’t biodegrade but will attract rodents as it rots.
And if you’re not a sit-down diner but a drive-through gobbler? Dennis said the best thing you can do is recycle the standard paper products (bags, receipts, milk cartons) at home as you normally would. The compostable materials — the cups and lids, the sandwich wrappers and straw sleeves — you can bring back to Burgerville and sort out yourself.
It’s not a perfect solution, Dennis acknowledged, and what’s also not perfect is that just 22 of Burgerville’s 39 restaurants have those compost stations and shipments to Everett. The other 17 are “outliers” that the system hasn’t yet reached — so they still dump that compostable material in the trash. Dennis said she looks forward to the day that changes.
“We don’t have a complete solution, but we love your question because it raises regional awareness,” she said.
Got a question about your neighborhood? We’ll get it answered. Send “What’s up with that?” questions to neighbors@columbian.com.
