 When you think of your favorite fast food brands, you probably envision the packaging those foods come in, whether that's the iconic Starbucks cup, the red McDonald's french fry box, or a big party bucket full of KFC chicken. But as we become more aware of how detrimental all those containers are to the environment and how toxic they can be for our bodies, we wondered, can fast food survive without single use packaging? For decades, American diners have been able to frequent their favorite fast food joints and walk out with their meal wrapped in handy disposable packaging. From your morning latte to your afternoon salad to that late night taco run, single use plastics can be found everywhere. But all that waste is sending nearly 9 million tons of plastic into the oceans every year. To better understand the science of how all this plastic impacts our bodies, we chatted with Megan Wolfe, Policy Director at Environmental Nonprofit, Beyond Plastics. Well, we're all aware of that warning about don't microwave your food in plastic. So we all have this sort of sense that like heat and plastic and food, maybe not the best. Plastic is stable, very stable, but it's not inert. And increasingly studies are demonstrating that when you put hot food or any hot substance in conjunction with plastic, it does react and that the chemicals inside leech out into the food. Even at room temperature, there's a reaction, but it's accelerated when it's hot. What we really need to be doing is cutting back on single use packaging overall, especially the kinds that we only use for a matter of minutes and then toss into the trash. How did we get here? When did our obsession with on the go lunches eclipse our awareness of environmental impact? To begin to answer that question, we chatted with journalist and author Adam Chandler, who wrote a book about the history of fast food in the U.S. What's interesting to me about the history of single use packaging and fast food is that basically the entire industry is predicated on it. The story kind of begins in 1948 with McDonald's. They had a successful barbecue stand and they decided to close it down, which shocked everybody. And they reformulated their entire business around being a restaurant that didn't serve food on plates anymore. They didn't use utensils, they fired all of their wait staff and basically created a model where you grab your food, it's wrapped up, and you take it with you. And everything goes into the trash, you don't have to wash any dishes, you don't have to clean any cups. This became the model for efficiency, especially as car culture was taking off. There are lots of examples of how investing in single use packaging has proved lucrative for these players too. One of the ways that Heinz kind of murdered all of its competitors, as fast food car culture was taking off, they created the small single serve packaging for the Heinz Ketchup's. And it was one thing that helped them get contracts with a bunch of fast food companies. So given how entwined fast food is with single use packaging, we wondered, is it possible for the industry to evolve beyond it? That led us to Just Salad, a brand that's been working to avoid generating waste from its stores since its founding in 2006 by Nick Kenner. Just Salad offers reusable packaging to customers who wish to reduce single use waste every day. And we have a very established reusable bowl program where you purchase a reusable bowl for a dollar. And every time you come back to the store, we provide a free topping as a reward for using it. The program keeps about three tons of packaging waste out of landfills annually. Our most active stores have up to 25% of customers using it on a daily basis. And the more you bring back the bowl, the more your carbon emissions and water savings increase. Recently, Just Salad added a new kind of bowl that customers can get when they order through the app. We recognized that the next stage of our reusable packaging program was to make it possible to order in a reusable container when you were ordering digitally. When you opt in, you come to the store to pick up the order you placed digitally. And this bowl will be at the pickup shelf. When you're finished, come back to Just Salad and return it and pick up your next order. But this kind of behavior change can't happen for everyone overnight. While Just Salad is working to convert as many people as possible to reusables, they still have an option for folks that aren't up for it yet. The recycling rates of plastic are very low. So we move to these fiber containers that are derived from a natural resource, sugarcane, that is renewable. Meaghan pointed out that those materials often cause other problems. It's not nearly the get out of jail free card that we hoped it was. So-called compostable biodegradable alternatives actually are often manufactured with the same chemical burden that went into the plastics themselves. And when it does biodegrade, it's not the same as turning leaf litter into compost because it doesn't have the same nutrient profile. It's sugars, it's chemicals. We believe that no matter how sustainable your packaging is, it is not the true end solution we use is. Okay, but what about when you order your dinner from a service like DoorDash or Grubhub and it comes encased in layers of plastic packaging? To answer that question, we talked with Lauren Sweeney, co-founder and CEO of Deliver Zero. Deliver Zero is a system for reusable containers. Lives across different merchants, different platforms. We make it easy for customers to opt in. They're in person, through delivery apps, or actually through our own platform. And we make it easy for customers to return reusable packaging. I like to say that we make reuse easier than recycling and more transparent. So customers know that when they return a container back into our system, it will be sanitized and used again and again and again. Well, just salad and Deliver Zero are charting a path forward for fast casual restaurants to swap some disposables for reusable. They're not exactly tapping into the traditional fast food market. Would it be possible to translate the work that they're doing into the realm of McDonald's and Burger King? They think yes. We're prepared to help create these positive experiences where somebody walks by their co-workers desk and sees that beautifully designed reusable bowl that shows that that brand doesn't just put out platitudes about the earth and the planet and how we need to save it. It shows that the brand actually cares about being part of real solutions rather than greenwashing. Over the last couple years, McDonald's and Burger King have begun testing reusable packaging options with Loop, a project of TerraCycle. But so far, those haven't moved beyond small scale pilot programs. What's sad about a lot of the pledges you'll see is those things are promises that are made five or ten years out. It's hard to know whether anyone's actually keeping track of these promises. It's more about grabbing short term attention. So I'm always nervous when I hear that something is going to happen because it's very easy to throw a wrench in the works and say, well, this actually didn't happen because of X, Y and Z. It's reasonable to be cynical about whether these places will actually change. But you are seeing these changes happen because I think there is a sort of moving demand for this that is influencing the way that these are happening. Fast food is so entwined with American culture that none of these changes are going to happen overnight. And they're likely going to face a lot of headwinds from not only the fast food companies themselves, but also the range of players that benefit from the business of single use plastics. It's going to be really hard to challenge single use packaging in fast food and American culture broadly because we are a convenience culture. We are obsessed with time and we're obsessed with efficiency. And that speaks to kind of how we're built. I think it's going to have to come down to smarter single use packaging before it comes down to eradicating it altogether. So back to our original question. Can fast food brands evolve beyond single use packaging? The jury's still out on that. But brands like Just Salad and Deliver Zero are doing their best to chart a path forward. It's just a question of whether the market leaders will follow.