Hundreds of Detroit-area restaurants and cafes use environmentally friendly compostable cups, cutlery and containers, but the items often meet the same fate as their plastic counterparts – a landfill.

There, the items slowly break down, producing methane, a greenhouse gas 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. Compostable products are slowly making up more of the food packaging market nationally, but unless you live in a major U.S. city with city-wide composting, your cup probably isn’t being composted. 

If properly composted, these products can decompose and turn into nutrient-rich soil.

But right now, composting is limited in Detroit, said Michael Edwards, co-founder of Midtown Composting, which provides services for 1,000 homes and businesses in the city. He can accept only a small amount of compostable food packaging due to existing restrictions on composting in the city. 

“It’s hard to do it right now. It’s hard to do it properly. It’s hard to do it well,” said Edwards. “It takes a lot of effort with the way we’re doing it now, and we could logistically do it in better ways, if we could have industrial composting within the city.” 

Composting alternative plastics is different from backyard composting and requires an industrial process using specific microorganisms and higher temperatures. Additionally, under the current city code, composting cannot be the principal use for land, and items like bones and animal grease are prohibited. In comparison, nearby cities like Royal Oak and Ann Arbor accept animal bones and other items in their compost. 

“I’m hoping the regulations (in Detroit) open up,” said Edwards. 

By composting and recycling, Detroit could reach net-negative waste-sector emissions by 2030, according to a 2022 report by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA). This year the city is piloting its first residential compost program funded by Carhartt, and the City Planning Commission is in preliminary talks about a possible composting ordinance. Officials said they are unable to provide more details at this time.

Currently, the city has few places to take these items, which are made from corn, sugar or paper, versus the petroleum products of traditional plastic. 

Some brands indicate as much in tiny green print like “facilities may not exist in your area” and “commercially compostable only.” And they can’t be recycled with paper or plastic because they will contaminate it. 

The scale of compostable food packaging produced, used and disposed of in Detroit isn’t entirely clear. But the general manager of a local compostable food packaging manufacturer said he has a lot of local clients. 

“We have hundreds of customers in the Detroit area using eco-friendly products for their food service,” Steve Harworth of Green Safe Products said by email. 

Green Safe has an 80,000-square-foot manufacturing facility at Fenkell and Linwood. In the past six months, the company sold 2.8 million cold cups made from corn and 4,800 cases of fiber take-out clamshells made from sugar cane stalk called bagasse, according to Harworth. 

Why offer the products?

In Detroit and surrounding areas, hundreds of eateries have gone the extra mile to use these environmentally-friendly products. 

Some businesses offer a compost bin on site for used items, but other restaurants and cafes don’t. Some owners said they don’t offer compost in-store because they weren’t aware that the items needed to be composted in an industrial system. Others said the nature of a to-go package is that the customer is taking it outside of their eatery and disposing of it elsewhere. 

“Most of the cups leave our premises. That’s up to the consumer to do with it what they need to,” said Betsy Murdoch, co-owner of The Congregation cafe in Detroit’s Boston Edison neighborhood. “The majority of our business is carry-out more than anything else; it’s a huge portion of what we do.” 

At Vámonos cafe and studio in southwest Detroit, owner Denisse Lopez composts food scraps, but has customers throw away the compostable cups in the regular trash. She said she didn’t know that the cups should be disposed of separately.

When Yum Village in New Center began operating, the only option for dine-in or carry-out was compostable food packaging. The eatery began utilizing reusable plates and cutlery about a month ago. 

“It was a big focus for me to do things to be good for the environment,” said Godwin Ihentuge, who also partners with Too Good To Go, an app that allows restaurants to sell leftover unsold food to customers at a discount and reduce food waste. 

Ihentuge said a lack of space and capacity are challenges to composting, noting it would be a challenging task to have a designated space for the practice that wouldn’t be susceptible to vandals as well as a staffer focused on parsing through discarded items for composting. 

Previously, Ihentuge said, Yum Village had a flower and herb bed for community members.  

“That entire strip was vandalized, kicked down. People were defecating inside the Hibiscus flowers,” he said. 

Compostable packaging for a small business does mean added cost, said Craig Batory, owner of Craig’s Coffee in the Cass Corridor.

“You’re not going to make money from composting, but that should be a cost of doing business,” he said.

It costs one or two cents more per compostable cup, he said, a cost he factored in from the time he first started his business because of his sustainability values. He also pays $50 a month to Brighton-based CO Sustainability to pick up the shop’s compost and take it to an industrial facility. It allows Batory to compost the cups used at his shop and 15 to 20 pounds of coffee grounds each week. 

“I want to be as environmentally-conscious as possible,” he said, in addition to wanting to educate customers. 

“My footprint is really small in the grand scheme of things, but it’s the point of bringing awareness to it,” said Batory. “My concern is if they’re not composted, they’re just going into the trash and get broken down and become methane at the end of the day anyway.”

‘Is compostable plastic a hoax?’ 

When it comes to recycling traditional plastic made from crude oil and natural gas, it is somewhat of a hoax. The products have been deceitfully marketed as “recyclable” by the plastics industry when recent documents show the plastic industry knew for 40 years it would never work.

Jøn Kent, co-owner of Sanctuary Farms, an urban farm and composter on Detroit’s east side, said he has concerns about composting packaging in general, advocating against single-use anything. 

“Is compostable plastic a hoax? This (expletive) is not what it seems – it’s a problem,” said Kent. 

Harworth, of Green Safe Products, said it’s still good to use the alternative products even if the items are put in the trash. 

“Even if a restaurant or the home consumer is not composting these products, the use of a one-time item made from renewable resources over a petroleum-made product is much better for our environment,” he said by email. “Many of our products still end up in a landfill, and it is still better than Styrofoam and plastic being sent to the landfill, which never breaks down.” 

Kent said there is a concern of PFAS with compostable food packaging as well.

PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” are used in food packaging to make the materials oil- and water-repellant to prevent them from breaking down, and are commonly used in compostable fiber bowls. Research has found that the PFAS chemicals migrate from the packaging into the food and are consumed. Another study found that compost from facilities that accepted compostable food containers had PFAS concentrations more than three times that of compost from facilities that did not. 

In 2020, U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell introduced legislation to ban  PFAS in food packaging, and the Democratic lawmaker has highlighted the discovery of the forever chemicals in Ann Arbor’s compost. 

Harworth said Green Safe used PFAS in some of its materials before switching to natural coatings two years ago to ensure products like plates, bowls and take-out containers don’t leak.

“It (the material) composts better than the normal plastics, but it still lingers around PFAS, and that is a real issue,” said Kent.