ASHEVILLE — Eric Bradford, director of operations for Asheville GreenWorks, has proof of your appetite for plastic.

It's bobbing away in Hendersonville's Mud Creek: a floating pontoon, called a "Trash Trout," which has trapped nearly 3,000 pounds of trash since the summer, all but 600 pounds of which was plastic. 

"The amount of trash we pick up is astonishing, and it's all plastics," Bradford said.

It's a modern problem, and some food businesses are owning up to the part they play in it. Trader Joe's, for example, announced in December plans to curb plastic use by 1 million pounds this year.

It's a noble effort; the Environmental Protection Agency says food and packaging, including to-go containers and cups, make up nearly half the landfill fodder in the United States.

Randy Talley, who owns four Green Sage Cafes with Roger Derrough, said it will take a sea change to tamp down the plastic problem. 

"Now that the genie is out of the bottle, how will we ever get it back in?" he said. "Plastic is such a seemingly ideal solution for so many things. Plastic is everywhere, and it will take consumers and a political will from leadership at all levels of government to get plastic out of our system."

Trader Joe's to eliminate some plastics

This year, Trader Joe's plans to eliminate more than 1 million pounds of plastic from stores including Asheville's, targeting produce packages, greeting-card sleeves and flower bags, and eliminating Styrofoam meat trays.

Many Asheville restaurants operating with only a fraction of the capital at Trader Joe's disposal are working to follow suit, and Bradford said GreenWorks wants to help facilitate what can be an arduous task. 


The company issued a statement on Tuesday promising to have 100 percent recyclable packaging for all private-label products by 2025.

The nonprofit has been cleaning up Western North Carolina for 46 years, well before "single-use plastics" became a vilified buzzword.  

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The group recently launched a Plastic Reduction Task Force, with one of its newly formed subcommittees charged with helping restaurants find the resources they need to go greener — because even veteran environmental stewards sometimes find a hard time keeping up. 

It's not easy being green

William Dissen, owner of The Market Place, has used compostable silverware and to-go containers for the decade he's owned the 40-year-old restaurant.

"From the beginning, my whole idea has always been using local food, being sustainable, recycling and composting, because that's just how you should do it," he said. "Not because I'm a soapbox-standing Greenpeace tree-hugging hippie who's lived in Asheville for 10 years and drank the Kool-Aid."

Even with eight thermal solar panels on his roof, Dissen said there's still room for improvement, including figuring out how to nix the plastic straws at the bar, now only available by request.

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With millions of straws ending up on beaches and waterways, Dissen, a member of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch's Blue Ribbon Task Force, is particularly interested in eliminating them. But it hasn't been easy.

"I have tried so many paper straws, and they suck," he said. "I want to embrace them."

Easily 50 percent more money than plastic straws, paper straws fail the quality test, he said. "You put them into a drink and, within seconds your drink tastes like wet paper."

He also tried metal straws, but worries that they're just too tough to clean properly. He's now working to source bamboo straws.

It's a lot of work and a lot of money. Plus, some customers not only don't care, they're peeved at any glimmer of a no-straw movement. 

"I had a group of people come in one time and they ordered drinks, we put the drinks down, and they all freaked out: 'Where's my straw?'" 

Dissen then delivered his best "Monterey Bay healthy-environment spiel."

"They were unimpressed."

How big of a deal are straws really?

You've likely seen the viral video of a sea turtle with a straw stuck in its nose. 

But are straws really that big of a deal or just low-hanging fruit for environmental activists?

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"That turtle has become the poster child for straws," said Bradford. "That's terrible, but that's just bad luck; he probably ingests way more plastic bags than straws in his life."

Still, he said, straws are perhaps the single most ubiquitous bit of restaurant trash: not everyone gets a to-go container or cup. But nearly everyone gets a straw.

"The straw is low-hanging fruit because it's an easy target and it's not recyclable," said Bradford. "If you can make a small change, that's a big one."

Several local restaurants have moved to make that change, including Rocky's Hot Chicken Shack, 12 Bones Smokehouse and Bouchon.

Chestnut and The Corner Kitchen both stock paper straws, paper to-go boxes and have composted for the better part of a decade. 

Asheville Brewing Company also dumped plastic in favor of paper straws last year. 

Randy Talley, who with Roger Derrough owns Green Sage Cafe, said his stores all use compostable straws.

But he wonders whether trash activists ought to hammer home the straw point so hard.

"When it comes to straws, I'm a little like, OK, that's the most minor point of all," he said. "The demand for removing the straw for restaurants is more of a situation where environmentalists are being activistic; the consumer, in general, is not demanding that."

Tally looks at a restaurant as a system of environmental challenges, each dilemma requiring a solution. "But there's no perfect solution, so we just try to move in the right direction."

That's included signing on with Arcadia Power, buying wind-powered energy to offset coal-powered electricity use.

The Merrimon location also offers incentives to customers who bring back their glass cold-pressed juice bottles — which already cost the restaurant an astounding 90 cents — by donating 10 cents per bottle to Greenworks.

A reverse-osmosis water system encourages customers to refill their own water bottles rather than buying the water in single-use plastic.

Talley admits he stocks plastic water bottles, though they've long been on the chopping block.

"It's amazing, people's desire for convenience," he said. "There's a high demand for water in a bottle, and water in glass is not convenient, because it's heavy."

The environmental dilemmas in running a food-service operation are abundant, he said, but he considers composting to be the most important thing anyone can do for the environment.  

"Stop treating your food scraps like trash; they're precious. Everyone: compost now —and throw the (compostable) straws in the compost pile."

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More flies with honey

Bradford said Greenworks has a forthcoming Go Easy Guide, an online resource to help business owners find affordable solutions to waste problems.

He also intends it as a place to lift up local restaurants doing good green work, rather than pillory others for wasteful blunders.

"It is an expensive expectation here in Asheville — to be completely compostable, gluten-free, corn-free and lit with solar lights," he said. 

The Biltmore Estate, which sees around 1.5 million visitors annually, has the funds to decrease plastic use, swapping the Inn's plastic cocktail picks for renewable bamboo versions and installing a high-end filtered water system at the Dining Room to reduce the need for bottles.

Not every business owner can afford to take such steps, and Bradford said the majority of businesses' barriers to eliminating plastics comes down to expense.

A restaurant owner trying desperately to make payroll might cut out compostable paper products, which can cost up to 10 times more than a Styrofoam container.  

"We're going into this realistically. Definitely don't punish folks," he said. 

Especially in the first months of business, sometimes blunders happen.

Elisha Lewis, an owner of Rolled and Roasted on Merrimon, was bullied on social media for transgressions like serving food on paper plates in the restaurant's first days and putting to-go food in Styrofoam packages.

But he blames that oversight on growing pains, including a last-minute ordering issue and a dishwasher installation delay. 

The problems have been resolved, with biodegradable cups and utensils and recycled paper products now in place, just like the restaurant's Asheville Mall location.

But about those straws? They're also a sticking point for Lewis. "Especially with a drive-thru, we cannot have people's straws falling apart as they drive."

What can you do to help?

Passions run high over plastics, and ire over straw bans did nothing to curb the turnout at Greenworks' first Plastic Reduction Task Force meeting, which was so overwhelmed with volunteers that it became its own organizational hurdle.

Bradford said the intense interest shows a growth in environmental awareness. 

"You've got a populace aching for change in some way or fashion. They're looking for something and they know this is change that can be made."

Greenworks is still accepting volunteers for the Plastic Reduction Task Force on its website, but not everyone has the time to join a task force. So what else can you do? 

Start small: Say no thanks to the next server who offers up a straw or a styrofoam to-go container, said Bradford. "But don't use the situation as a podium. We don't need to beat the server up."



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