If you're an avid fan of the salad chain Sweetgreen (Curry Cauliflower for lifeeee), you'll know that the chain has made some changes in recent years to in an effort to try and become more sustainable. You may have even seen the signs in restaurants that say "Nothing from inside Sweetgreen goes to the landfill.” But a new L.A. Times report has shown that is not—and has not—been true. It also shed light on just how difficult it is to make a truly zero-waste business.
Although the chain's takeout containers, utensils, and cups are all technically compostable, in many of the markets in which it operates, city-wide composting does not really exist. When it does exist, many refuse to compost bioplastics.
Sweetgreen tried to come up with a solution in New York City, hiring an outside contractor to take compost upstate where it would be broken down and not end up in a landfill. But, Sweetgreen executive Kevin Quand told The Times that he got an anonymous tip in 2016 saying the vendor was apparently not processing the compost and in fact dumping it into the, well, dump.
On top of that, in 2017, the company found out that it was using plastic salad bowls that were non-certified compostable, which it remedied by 2018 by switching to bowls made of a molded sugarcane fiber. Just when they thought they were out of the woods, in 2019, a report found the bowls contained a chemical that is allegedly cancer-causing and unable to fully break down. And so it goes.
“It’s taken a lot of work for us to get to where we are today,” says Nicholas Jammet, chief concept officer and co-founder of Sweetgreen told them. “There’s only so much that’s technically in your control.”
The whole piece is maddening both as a person who gleefully pays double-digit dollars for a salad that you feel is made in a "responsible way" but also if you put yourself in the mind of a Sweetgreen worker, or really any company attempting to be more Earth-friendly, in a system that doesn't seem to be designed for it.
The company acknowledged to the L.A. Times that it was certainly frustrating for them to try and find ways to be true to their environmentally friendly message and truly green with so many barriers in the way. They are slowly making more changes, which you can read about in greater detail in the Times piece, but for now, they also have to trust the outside vendors they're currently working with.
“At this point, we all just have to take their words for it, which is kind of crazy,” Quandt said: “I just want to sleep at night knowing, after all this work, the truck isn’t just going to the dump.”
