A Gainesville restaurant is struggling to afford environmentally friendly, sustainable options in its takeout line.
Sushi Chao, a weigh-and-pay, self-serve Pan-Asian restaurant, has downgraded its to-go containers from a more sustainable plastic Styrofoam hybrid to straight Styrofoam because it’s cheaper.
General manager Paul Cheng said the old containers weren’t truly classified as reusable, and he said reusable dishes are in the works.
“We’re trying to develop them, but at the same time, we’re so limited with space,” he said. “That’s the main reason why we don’t have washable dishes for in-house use.”
The restaurant sees 150 to 200 customers during the two-hour lunch rush within the cramped 1,900-square-foot facility, Cheng said.
“With the rush hours being so busy, there’s no way that we can actually keep up with it,” he said. “I don’t know what the outcome will be.”
UF director of sustainability studies Leslie Thiele said there’s no cheap way to be sustainable.
“You have to look at each particular situation and try to understand the long-term consequences of doing what you’re doing,” he said, “both from a social, from an environmental and from an economic point of view.”
Michael Stone, a 26-year-old UF health science communications graduate student, said it’s hard to tell whether restaurants are actually practicing sustainability.
“You don’t see behind-the-scenes work of what they’re doing with their used organic materials for composting or what they’re doing with their recyclable materials,” he said.
In Sushi Chao’s case, Stone said, even Styrofoam can be recycled.
But he said that in the long-run, businesses will always make decisions for economic reasons.
“At the end of the day, it just comes down to the bottom-dollar figure,” Stone said. “So, they’re going to be more worried about turnover and selling stuff versus trying to save the world.”
[A version of this story ran on page 5 on 3/26/2014 under the headline "Sushi Chao switches take-out containers to Styrofoam"]
