Kellett Tell It_Spring 2015

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Fast Food Packaging

Tell It KELLETT PREPARATORY SCHOOL, MARCH 2015

The Green Issue

by Sophia Schwarzwalder Ever ybody gets a craving for fast food sometimes. But when you finish your mouthwatering burger, fries, and milkshake, did you ever think about what happens to the packaging your meal came in?

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In December, I interviewed a woman named Gabriel who works at Friends of the Earth Hong Kong, a leading environmental organisation that focuses on protecting our local and regional environment, to try and get an answer to this question.

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Fast food comes in lots of different kinds of packaging, like the red and yellow french fry boxes from McDonalds or the paper wrapper that holds a Whopper from Burger King. In Hong Kong, when you throw your used fast food packaging into the rubbish, most of it ends up piled up in a landfill. In fact, Gabriel told me that Hong Kong’s landfills are made up of 40% food waste, 20% plastic, and 20% paper. Fast food packaging is a big contributor.

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Some kinds of packaging decompose faster than others. These are called compostable plastics or bio-plastics. Bio-plastics are made from renewable materials like corn-starch or potato starch. They can decompose within a matter of months, but most plastics take hundreds of years to decompose.

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A more environmentally friendly way would be to recycle our plastic and paper fast food containers, but this is not as easy as you may think. Before a piece of packaging can be recycled, it has to be a) washed and cleaned, b) sorted, and c) placed in the correct bin. Recycling in Hong Kong is not standard practice. According to Gabriel, “plastic was the most recycled material in Hong Kong in 2010, but in the past two or three years, the plastic recycling rate dropped.”

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So what can fast food restaurants in Hong Kong do to make their packaging more environmentally friendly?

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One thing they could do is try to make sure as much of their packaging as possible gets recycled. They could pay someone to clean, separate, and put all of the packaging in the proper recycling bin. They could also put signs in their restaurants that show people how to properly clean and recycle their take away packages. This would reduce the amount of fast food packaging that goes into landfill. Another thing they can do is use more bio-plastics in their packaging, so that the packaging that does go to landfills would be able to decompose more quickly.

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These solutions might take more work and take away profits from fast food restaurants, but it’s worth it because we only have one environment and if we mistreat it, it will be gone forever. So next time you take a big bite out of a Big Mac, think about whether you can recycle the box it came in!


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