There’s a new reusable food container program happening in Victoria, and it has a Camosun College connection. Camosun Culinary Arts chair David Lang is a founding member of the Bread and Butter Collective, who started the program.
For $8, people can buy a reusable, polymer-based container at a participating restaurant when they get a take-out meal (it’s a purchase, not a deposit; if you lose the container, you have to buy a new one). The next time the person orders at a participating restaurant, they bring their empty container in and their food will be packaged in a clean container. Here at Camosun, the Huber Hall cafeteria at Interurban and the Camosun food truck are participating.
“The reusable-container program is an initiative of the Bread and Butter Collective, a local group of owner-operated restaurants which I have the pleasure of being involved in, as not an owner/operator of a restaurant,” says Lang. “We care about sustainability and three pillars: financial stability, health stability, and environmental stability.”
Lang says that the reusable containers—which about 20 businesses have signed up to utilize—are part of one of Bread and Butter’s three environmental initiatives they are working on. He says the first is eliminating plastic bottles and using only glass and recyclable bottles.
“The second piece is eco-packaging—so compostable, recyclable packaging,” he says. “So no more styrofoam, no more non-compostable plastic, and for the most part we’re trying to use craft paper or fibre. The third part, which kind of goes along with the second part, is the reusable-container program. I’ve been involved in reusable-container programs in the past that were single-entity programs and they have not been successful, just because they didn’t get the traction. This container program has the backing of about 20 people signed up within Greater Victoria. And it is transferrable from restaurant to restaurant or institution to institution.”
The program will launch as soon as the containers have arrived, “as shipping is a huge issue,” says Lang, who stresses that this is a Culinary Arts initiative, not a Camosun College or Aramark initiative.
“We’ll have containers available for purchase,” he says. “When they come into the cafeteria it is required that they pre-purchase their container before they get their food. So they bring it up to either our short-order area or cafeteria entree line and present it as the vessel they want to receive their food in. [Then they] enjoy their food, take it home and wash it themselves… When they do come back in, they bring in the cleaned container, we put it into an inventory of used containers for sanitizing, give them a cleaned, sanitized container, and they go ahead and purchase their food.”
As for what Bread and Butter hopes to achieve, Lang says that the collective’s goal with this initiative is to reduce the amount of packaging out there.
“We’re not going to not use plastic at this point, but we can use it more responsibly,” he says.
Lang feels that initiatives like this one aren’t hard for people to take part in, and says that he doesn’t think it’s too much to ask people to make the effort.
“I think the idea of using less or being more conscious about what we use is not a new idea. It has existed for a long time,” he says. “We’ve gotten away from conscious thought in what we do for a long time… I would just challenge other people to just do the basics and stop talking and start doing. Because it’s not that hard.”
See a list of restaurants participating in the reusable-container program at breadandbuttercollective.com.