Cornstarch and sugar cane may be common elements in baking, but now the two ingredients are also used in a recipe to make forks and carryout bags, and plates and cups. As our landfills overflow with plastic utensils and Styrofoam boxes, restaurants across the nation, including here in Hawaii, are beginning to look for alternative greener products, as well as energy-efficient equipment.
In May during the National Restaurant Association's annual convention in Chicago, members unveiled a "green" restaurant initiative with an aim at encouraging fellow restaurateurs to think about controlling waste creation and energy use.
It's reported that the average restaurant annually consumes approximately 500,000-kilowatt hours of electricity, 20,000 therms of natural gas and 800,000 gallons of water. According to estimates from the California-based Food Service Technology Center, which is administered by Pacific Gas & Electric, if those figures were applied against the latest EPA carbon equivalents, the sum would amount to 490 tons of carbon dioxide produced per year per restaurant. Now, that's an EEE-sized carbon footprint.
In a previous newsletter, Hawaiian Electric Company reported that Hawaii restaurants consume a significant portion of the state's energy as an aggregate group with more than 8,000 food service businesses.
"Imagine the implications for global warming if we get the whole restaurant industry to go green," said Ted Turner during an interview with USA Today. The one-time media mogul turned philanthropist and now restaurateur only uses paper straws, recycled paper carryout sacks and containers at his 55 Ted's Montana Grills locations.
Efficient energy use is one way for restaurants to reduce their waste; another is to turn to bio-degradable, compostable products. This is what local chefs Ed Kenney and Sean Priester — among others — have done, turning to eco-friendly goods and removing Styrofoam and plastic from their inventory, and replacing them with sugarcane clamshell take-out boxes and Bioplastic knives and forks manufactured from cornstarch.
"You can see Styrofoam in our garbage, in our ocean and you can literally see tons of it at our dumpsites," said Kenney, chef and co-owner of Town in Kaimuki and Downtown in the Hawai'i State Art Museum. "We're all accountable to the environment and we should do what we can do to reduce our carbon footprint."
When Kenney and partner/chef David Caldiero opened Town three years ago, their business philosophy was based on a social-enterprise model, with not one, but a triple bottom line.
"I call it the three Ps: People, planet and profit," explained Kenney, who graduated from business school then dropped out of the corporate world to pursue the culinary arts 12 years ago. "It's not just about the bottom line. It's about the environment, the people who produce the food and putting the profit back into the community."
Priester, who said that he takes cues from Kenney when it comes to "sustainability," recently changed his approach to the kitchen, aligning himself with a new movement in this industry.
"It's about using eco-friendly products from local farmers and ranchers as much as possible," he said. "This takes a great commitment not only from staff members but also from the Maus (owners of The Top of Waikiki), who've been absolutely supportive in the direction I've taken the restaurant."
And while the cost of going green may be more expensive, Priester and Kenney believe it's the right thing to do.
"Before news about business and environment ran contrary to one another," Kenney asserted. "I don't think that's the case anymore, at least not in my own little bubble here at the corner of Waialae and 9th Avenue."
While its name may conjure up images of fear, Styrophobia is an 18-month-old locally-based company that's helping chefs, like Priester and Kenney, kick their dependency on non-biodegradable polystyrene — better known by manufacturer Dow Chemical Company's brand name, Styrofoam — and plastic.
Owners Krista Ruchaber and Mike Elhoff teamed up with an eco-products distributor in the San Francisco Bay area and partnered with the company to bring the products to Hawaii in bulk. Now the company carries a full complement of bowls, plates and trays made from bagasse (sugar cane fiber), as well as straws and cups molded from cornstarch.
"As businesses change their strategies and shift to a more sustainable eco-model, demand for Styrophobia products has increased," Ruchaber said. "It's rewarding to see the conversion away from plastics and Styrofoam toward biodegradable and compostable products."
Local distributing companies, including Hansen Distribution Group, Malolo Beverage & Supplies and Diamond Head Distributors, are now also helping Styrophobia spread their products across the state.
"They've been getting a lot of requests for alternatives," Ruchaber said. "When we first started, there was a misconception about price and costliness, but that's no longer a problem. We're doing higher volume, which is helping bring down prices."
Meanwhile, Elhoff believes more education is needed to show Island residents that shipping our garbage out or building another H-Power Plant are not the ultimate solutions, but are simply band-aids to a serious problem.
"I don't want to shove anything down people's throats," he said. "I believe in the free market, but I think choices are needed when the environment is being destroyed."
Citing San Francisco as an ideal model in the way the city reduced its waste, both Ruchaber and Elhoff said they'd like to see Hawaii go in the same direction.
"Thirty-five percent of our waste can be composted, which will lead to a lesser use of fertilizer and water," Elhoff asserted. "And if you add food scraps to yard waste, you'll get a better balance of nitrogen, phosphorous and ammonia."
But because most leftovers are packed in Styrofoam boxes, scraps must be first sorted before they can be composted, an unnecessary step when using biodegradable and compostable containers.
"A sugarcane plate will break down in two weeks and a utensil made from cornstarch will take 12 weeks to break down into non-toxic, organic pieces," Elhoff explained. "In contrast, polystyrene contains inorganic molecules that will end up in our eco system.
"We might not see it while we're driving down the road, but we know it's washing out in our streams and reefs, and choking our sea turtles and leaching toxins."
So the next time you're picking up a plate lunch or having leftovers packed, ask your server if the restaurant has an alternative to Styrofoam boxes and plastic utensils.
"In a survey we did, when consumers were asked if they would pay up to 25 cents more per meal served in a biodegradable containers, 88 percent 'strongly agreed,'" Ruchaber said. "We each have a responsibility to be good stewards of the land.
"Ideally our collective consciousness will shift and instead of consuming and using disposables we will reuse — bring our own containers for take-out; bring our coffee mugs each morning; and refill our stainless steel water bottles. Simple choices that collectively make a large impact."
Until then, Ruchaber and Elhoff said Styrophobia's mission is to complete a sustainable cycle: Convert the waste stream by replacing petroleum-based products with non-toxic biodegradables; and to divert the waste stream by establishing commercial composting facilities on each island, which not only will reduce the impact on the landfills but also generate compost to give back to the farmers to replenish the 'aina.
