School Lunch Tray Recycling Hits a Million a Month in California

10 June 2011 Over 1 million foam lunch trays used in California's schools are being recycled every month as part of a collaborative effort. The scheme involves public school systems, a waste hauler, a foodservice distributor, and Dart Container Corporation, a recycled food container specialist. As part of the scheme, at several participating school districts in California students clean their trays and stack them in school cafeterias, where they are then collected and delivered to Dart by P & R Paper - a distributor of food service supplies. According to Dart, the state's largest volunteer lunch tray recycling effort is helping schools to maintain costs, and at the same time is finding new uses the trays that are diverted from landfills and reprocessed into premium picture frames, interior moulding and other products. The Long Beach Unified School District, which uses roughly 7 million foam lunch trays a year, estimates that it will save $1 million a year through its recycling efforts. Dart says that it also runs a program whereby businesses and institutions lease a densifier - which reduces a mountain of foam products into a size that fits into a five-gallon bucket. The densifiers help reduce the amount of space required to store collected foam, which minimizes the number of recycling trip. Once the foam has been compacted, Dart transports the material to its facilities in Lodi and Corona, California, as well as facilities in other parts of the country. While the scheme has had considerable success in keeping lunch trays out of landfill, and in recycling them into new products, some have questioned whether the issue should not be tackled further up the waste hierarchy by utilising reusable trays. Sign up for Waste Management World's Free E-Mail Newsletters