Opinion: Let’s Encourage Austin Restaurants to Switch to Reusables, Away From Single-Use Items

News of plastic pollution in our waterways, oceans, and microplastics even in our bodies is inescapable. As one of the more visible forms of pollution, it only takes one walk around your favorite Austin park or waterway to recognize the impact that plastic and other single-use items are having on our city. This problem can feel quite far away when you eat at your favorite food establishment or order takeout, but the reality is, food and beverage packaging often make up some of the most frequent items to escape the waste management system and end up on our streets and in our environment.

The numbers are there to back this up in Austin. In 2021, over 100 Austinites mobilized a TrashBlitz to collect over 8,000 pieces of trash from local watersheds and revealed nearly one-third of this trash was food and beverage packaging. From these findings, community leaders, businesses, municipal staff, and NGO partners committed to the pursuit of waste reduction locally banded together to form the Austin Reuse Coalition. The coalition’s goal is to support food service establishments in transitioning from disposable foodware and packaging to reusables.

In an effort to better understand the degree of reuse and opportunities for improvement within Austin’s food and beverage industry, the coalition has since been gathering data on the landscape of reuse in the Austin food scene by using PlasticScore, a free zero-waste rating app. When The Austin Chronicle’s Best of Austin: Restaurants list was published, the coalition started to wonder, “Who’s best in terms of taste, but also their embrace of reuse, particularly for on-site dining?” A high score in the app indicates that almost everything provided by the restaurant is reusable. The places that get the lowest scores serve everything on disposables, even for dine-in options. Plastic plates, forks, and throwaway cups, when you aren’t even taking food to-go? No thanks!

After assessing the restaurants within the “Best Of” Cuisine category, the PlasticScore results showed that the restaurants that won their cuisine category and also scored the highest for dine-in using the PlasticScore app were Oseyo, Bouldin Creek Cafe, and Titaya’s Thai Cuisine. These restaurants favored reusable/washable dinnerware, cutlery, and glasses and provided minimal, if any, disposables. Fortunately, a number of other restaurants came in close behind, with only minor things – like straws given automatically to customers without their request, or disposable sauce containers – keeping them from the highest scores. The key factor that all these restaurants had in common, besides their excellent food, was their emphasis on serving with real plates, real cups, and real cutlery.

The room for improvement is much greater for establishments that scored far lower. The heavy reliance on disposable items, even in a dine-in setting, can be remedied, and resources exist for restaurants eager to improve and get away from all the waste. The commercial division of Austin Resource Recovery offers a Zero Waste Business Rebate to replace disposable food and drinkware with reusable options. The nonprofit Plastic Free Restaurants also provides subsidies to restaurants (and schools!) looking to make the switch to reuse. Members of the Austin Reuse Coalition and local nonprofit Plastic Reduction Project are also willing to talk with restaurateurs who want to improve.

Restaurant patrons can also make a difference by simply paying attention and trying to reduce single-use items when going out, while also encouraging food service establishments to make the switch to reuse. If you want to check out the PlasticScore of restaurants you are thinking about supporting, you can find those with the best (and worst) scores by downloading the PlasticScore App (look for the green turtle).

If you are eager to support the work of the Austin Reuse Coalition and become a rater, simply download the PlasticScore app, join the group “PRP,” and watch our training on how to leave a score. Follow @AustinReuseCoalition on Instagram for updates.

Doing your part is as easy as eating at any of Austin’s most beloved restaurants and taking a minute to assess them on the PlasticScore app. Eating out for a cause is a tough assignment, but someone has to do it!

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Authors Brandi Clark Burton, Macy Zander, Dawn Rodriguez, and Shannon Bailey are Austin Reuse Coalition & Plastic Reduction Project members. This collective of nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, business leaders, and passionate community members has a mission to prevent landfill waste by supporting Austin in the transition from single-use disposables to reusable alternatives. They conduct regular Restaurant Blitz events, volunteer-led citywide restaurant audits of plastic foodware.