Ask Food Delivery Apps to “Hold the Plastic”

During COVID, many more people are ordering take-out to help keep local restaurants afloat. Unfortunately, most take out orders arrive with an alarming amount of single-use items that customers do not need as most of us have plenty of cutlery, condiments, and napkins in our homes.

The vast majority of these single-use plastic items cannot be recycled, adding to our significant plastic pollution crisis, littering our streets, parks, rivers, and oceans and clogging already overfilled landfills.

Beyond Plastics and our allies in the environmental community are asking food delivery companies to help reduce this source of unnecessary plastic pollution by making a simple change to their ordering systems — rather than keeping the status quo in which including all of these items is the default setting, these companies can change their systems to make no single-use additions the default setting for orders. In fact, Uber Eats has already done it!

By simply switching cutlery, condiments, napkins and straws to an opt-in only option and following up with the restaurants they partner with to make sure they comply, these companies can help restaurants save money and prevent mountains of pointless plastic trash at the same time.

Join us in calling on these companies to make a small change that would yield big results.