“Green” lunch trays replacing Styrofoam at Lewis School

SUSTAINABLE LIFE

By Elizabeth Ussher Groff

The Bee, Mar 5, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (3 Reader comments)

Elizabeth Ussher Groff / THE BEE

At Lewis Elementary School in Woodstock, parents Silke Brunning and Susan Peterson wash trays that are green in more ways than one.

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What goes on the school lunch tray these days is “hot” — not just hot food, but a hot issue. To counteract childhood obesity, school districts are eliminating junk food and soda drinks, and attempting to provide more nutritious food on the school lunch tray.

But what goes into the lunch tray — in other words, what the lunch tray is made of — is also a hot issue. Several Southeast Portland schools, including Meriwether Lewis Elementary at S.E. 45th and Evergreen Street, are hot on the lunch tray issue.

A little background about lunch trays helps frame the issue.

Did you know that in 1998 Portland Public Schools (PPS) and the Beaverton School District, among others in the state, replaced washable, reusable lunch trays with polystyrene foam trays?

“It was an economic decision,” explains Ms. Cassedy Sullivan, AmeriCorps volunteer and Resource Conservation Coordinator for PPS. “Budgets were cut, and the district was downsizing. It became less expensive to pay less than one cent per polystyrene foam tray and recycle them, than to have staff wash the reusable trays.”

Sullivan points out that in 1990 the City of Portland made it illegal for restaurants to use Polystyrene foam “food-to-go” boxes, but PPS was exempted from that law. Sullivan adds that in the mid-’90’s the district sold its stock of plastic reusable trays. “We also sold some of the schools’ dishwashers at that time, but some schools still have theirs, and now others have gotten new ones,” she adds.

Nancy Bond, Resource Conservation Specialist for PPS, comments on that decision, made a decade ago. “At that time, PPS had a very complete polystyrene recycling program.” This made the budget decision more justifiable.

However, the Portland district lost their polystyrene recycler in 2002, and now the market for recycling polystyrene has dried up almost completely. The thin Polystyrene trays are heading each day to the landfill — 20,000 per day from Portland Public Schools alone.

Bond admits that people have been unhappy with the polystyrene trays for a while. “The topic has been going around. Only just now the stars have lined up to bring about some solutions.”

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