WASHINGTON —
Every year, billions of pounds of single-use plastics end up in landfills and some of these plastics can take centuries to decompose. But thanks to a new grant through DC's Department of Energy -- the Ditch the Disposables grant -- two brothers have created a solution.
Kevin and Harrison Kay are the co-founders of To Go Green, DC’s first reusable takeout container service.
Inspiration for this project stuck during the pandemic. The Kay brothers didn't like how much waste their takeout orders were generating.
“We try to be conscious of our environmental impact and so we were very frustrated by the amount of single-use waste that our takeout orders were creating," Kevin Kay said. "We thought there has to be a better way here."
The reusable take out containers are easy to access. All you have to do is head over to the To Go Green website and choose from one of the participating restaurants and order your takeout as normal. Everything is done on their website, so you don’t need to navigate multiple apps to create an eco-friendly order. When your delivery arrives, it will be packaged in a reusable container.
"They can be reused over and over again," Harrison Kay said of the containers. "They're dishwasher safe, they're microwave safe, they're BPA free, (and) they're certified by NSF International. So, we find that customers can use these many, many, many times and it's avoiding the waste.”
Once you eat your food, just rinse out the containers. You then have three weeks to return the containers either by requesting a porch pick up or by dropping them off at a participating restaurant. The restaurant will clean and sanitize the containers the same way they would their own kitchenware.
The containers are designed to withstand 1,000 uses, which not only helps cut down on single-use plastic, but as Michelle Brown, co-owner of the Teaism Restaurant group, says, it also helps save money.
“We often spend as much as 68 cents on a container for our Japanese-style Bento boxes that are very popular, and this cost is, you know that they're charging per use on these containers is vastly better," Brown said. "And so just that in and of itself, it's a no brainer we should totally do this. There is no additional cost to the consumer when choosing the reusable containers, and in just five uses they offset any environmental impact that was made in the creation and transportation of the containers."
So next time you're ordering takeout, you can do a little good for the environment along the way.