{"id":29107,"date":"2023-04-17T09:55:43","date_gmt":"2023-04-17T13:55:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/?page_id=29107"},"modified":"2023-05-02T15:07:13","modified_gmt":"2023-05-02T19:07:13","slug":"can-maine-restaurants-get-reusable-packaging-to-go","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/can-maine-restaurants-get-reusable-packaging-to-go\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Maine restaurants get reusable packaging \u2018to go\u2019?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Variety
Photo credit: Vitalii Matokha\/Shutterstock<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Graduate Researcher Jared Wildwistle and Dr. Cindy Isenhour study the feasibility of reusable take-out packaging in Maine <\/em><\/h3>\n

By Nathan Poole<\/p>\n

The thrift store in your local church\u2019s basement might be doing more for the community than saving families from spending $40 for jeans. Not only can systems of reuse, like thrift stores, reduce waste, they strengthen bonds between neighbors and make communities more resilient to hardship.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnytime we see any sort of big economic or cultural shock, a lot of times traditional supply chains are broken,\u201d Dr. Cindy Isenhour said. \u201cBut when you have more localized and resilient systems for procurement, they can help you weather those storms.\u201d<\/p>\n

Isenhour<\/a>, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Climate Change at the University of Maine, studies the way that people think about and deal with material waste. With funding from the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions, she and Jared Wildwistle<\/a>, a graduate of UMaine\u2019s Master\u2019s in Business Administration and Ecology and Environmental Science programs, have been studying the feasibility of a different kind of reuse system in Maine: reusable take-out packaging.<\/p>\n

Isenhour served as Wildwistle\u2019s advisor as he pursued dual master\u2019s degrees. Before enrolling at UMaine in 2020, Wildwistle was a brewer, co-founding Flight Deck Brewing in Brunswick. He saw first-hand how the pandemic exacerbated the difficulty of being economically and environmentally sustainable in the food-service industry. Finding sustainable product options for restaurants became one of his goals, and the pandemic was a powerful motivation for looking to reuse systems for solutions.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was the beginning of the pandemic, and you heard all these stories about mounting piles of single-use plastics \u2026 that problem was front and center in my mind at the time,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Reduce, Reuse. Full Stop.<\/h3>\n

Even before the pandemic, waste production had reached all-time highs due to jumps in online retail and food delivery. In the U.S., disposable packaging makes up roughly 36% of municipal waste streams, and 78% of that disposable packaging can be sourced to food service industries. While many restaurants and fast-food chains have shifted to biodegradable or recyclable packaging, they can be difficult to dispose of properly and do nothing to reduce the overall strain on the nation\u2019s waste management systems.<\/p>\n

As these economic and environmental problems reared their heads in 2020, Isenhour and Wildwistle saw the pandemic as an opportunity to investigate whether reusability could succeed in reducing the amount of single-use packaging in the waste stream, thereby alleviating struggles with recycling and composting.<\/p>\n

\"Cindy
Cindy Isenhour<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cAll of my projects try to tackle waste, but they don\u2019t try to do it from the backend where we\u2019re just dealing with products that are already wasted,\u201d Isenhour said. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to move up that production chain and change the way that products are designed and change the way that people interact with new products.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gaining a well-rounded understanding of the impacts that a shift to reusable packaging in restaurants would create is a lot for a professor and graduate student to wrap their heads around. Both Isenhour and Wildwistle are members of the Materials Management Research Group<\/a>, an interdisciplinary team established by the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions to study and address the economic, cultural, and environmental problems that stem from modern systems of extraction, production, and disposal. Wildwistle noted that the project wouldn\u2019t have been possible without input from the group\u2019s members, which includes professors of economics, engineering, nursing, business, and sociology.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving those connections, having that base of knowledge to draw from was invaluable, and the way that they think about things really helped me process what was going on in our project and in the state of Maine,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYankee Ingenuity\u201d<\/h3>\n

Wildwistle and Isenhour\u2019s work generally consisted of conducting surveys and workshops with representatives from waste management industries, restaurants, and municipal and regional planning commissions to get their perspectives on the difficulties with implementing reusable systems. Additionally, Isenhour and Wildwistle planned to facilitate pilot programs with restaurants and municipalities to better understand what it takes to get a reusable packaging system off the ground, culminating in an online resource guide<\/a> for those looking to implement similar programs in the future.<\/p>\n

The researchers approached the project with a hunch that Maine might be a particularly fertile environment in which reusable packaging systems could thrive. Reusable food service products and services have begun to emerge in cities like Boston and San Francisco, and while Maine is a far cry from those communities, Isenhour said that it might have an advantage in other ways.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaine has this really strong thrift mentality and a real aversion to waste; so, we thought, culturally, reusable products might make a lot of sense here and people might really adopt the concept,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Wildwistle said that a friend of his characterized Maine and its citizens as evoking a northern spin on \u201cYankee Ingenuity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a different way to doing things, to make use of what you have. I think that\u2019s one thing that Mainers all have in them, and I think that lends itself to reuse systems,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t to say that the researchers didn\u2019t anticipate challenges. Wildwistle said that the focus on tourism in Maine\u2019s economy presents a significant obstacle, as the state draws in many people that would have to come to grips with these systems while on vacation. It\u2019s much more challenging to get someone on board with returning their take-out packaging when they\u2019re only in the state for a couple of days.<\/p>\n

During a workshop, Maine restaurant owners, many of whom expressed interest in being more socially responsible and environmentally sustainable, raised lots of practical concerns about reusable systems related to logistics, incentives for customer participation, and municipal support. Wildwistle said that a lot of owners\u2019 hesitancy is rooted in anxieties about making changes that don\u2019t have precedents in the world around them. For instance, lots of owners wanted to know where they would keep a rotating surplus of packaging in already cramped kitchens. Wildwistle believes that lots of those fears can be dispelled through pilot programs.<\/p>\n

The Best Made Plans\u2026<\/h3>\n

There were very clear benefits and drawbacks to conducting the reusable packaging study at the height of the pandemic. The swiftly rising popularity of Zoom gave Wildwistle and Isenhour the flexibility to solicit input from restaurant owners and community partners from across the state. However, the economic challenges facing businesses also created barriers to participation. Lots of restaurant owners were interested in the project but needed to back out of meetings or workshops due to a COVID-19 outbreak or low staffing.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese projects always end up a little bit different than you anticipate,\u201d Isenhour said, laughing.<\/p>\n

The Mitchell Center researchers were able to solicit enough participation in the workshops and surveys to develop a framework for a pilot program. However, when it came time to get a pilot off the ground in the summer of 2022, they could not find a restaurant with sufficient staffing to comfortably commit to participating.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, the project has not been without its successes. Most significantly, Wildwistle and Isenhour worked with members of the Center for Disease Control\u2019s (CDC) Health Inspection Program to permit the implementation of reusable packaging in restaurants<\/a>. Wildwistle said that they\u2019d initially only intended to invite the CDC representatives to sit on the advisory board for the project, but during their early discussions it came to the representative\u2019s attention that reusable packaging was not allowed in Maine. In October, 2021, this resulted in the CDC releasing an internal policy to all inspectors to abide by the federal food code with regards to reusable packaging.<\/p>\n

An Optimistic Outlook<\/h3>\n
\"Jared
Jared Wildwistle<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Another hugely positive outcome from the project is Wildwistle\u2019s new professional role.<\/p>\n

After completing his dual master\u2019s degrees in 2022, Wildwistle was hired by the Gulf of Maine Research Institute to kickstart and manage the Climate Center\u2019s Business Climate Action Program<\/a>. The program is designed to work with businesses that rely on the ocean as they employ climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts. He\u2019s only been in the position for about half a year, but Wildwistle is already hard at work on issues like decarbonizing the seafood harvesting industry. Additionally, he is continuing the effort to investigate the potential for reusable take-out packaging in Maine with a grassroots group. \u201cThe Portland Re-Users\u201d is composed of representatives from local NGOs and Portland\u2019s Sustainability Office and was founded by those members to support reusable solutions in Portland.<\/p>\n

\u201cReally, [working with GMRI] goes back to my original reason for going back to school, which is to try and bridge the gap between environmental sustainability and financial sustainability,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Additionally, Isenhour said that she has submitted grant proposals to support potential pilot programs with partners in Bar Harbor or South Portland. Both researchers said that they have become more optimistic about the potential for seeing reusable take-out packaging take-off someday in Maine.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we can get a successful pilot up and running in the next year and prove that concept, [reusable packaging] could come [to Maine] within three years,\u201d Wildwistle said. \u201cThe concept isn\u2019t that far away from us now.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Graduate Researcher Jared Wildwistle and Dr. Cindy Isenhour study the feasibility of reusable take-out packaging in Maine By Nathan Poole The thrift store in your local church\u2019s basement might be doing more for the community than saving families from spending $40 for jeans. Not only can systems of reuse, like thrift stores, reduce waste, they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":957,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-29107","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"taxonomy_info":[],"featured_image_src_large":false,"author_info":{"display_name":"mitchellcenter","author_link":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/author\/mitchellcenter\/"},"comment_info":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/29107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/957"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29107"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/29107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29656,"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/29107\/revisions\/29656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}