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Single-Use Food Containers You Can Compost and Eat!

04.30.21 | By
Single-Use Food Containers You Can Compost and Eat!

April is when the world not only commemorates, but pushes initiatives to help restore mother Earth. At Pinch, our work is as much about sustainability as it is about taste + presentation. And thus, we are always looking for ways to keep our upstream supply chain as clean as possible to ensure we provide the same great parties, and a healthier planet.

Now, in this pandemic time of individual portions and take-out culture, we are seeing the desire for single-use products rise. Dedicated to our zero waste pledge, we are constantly on the lookout for alternative solutions. And so when the Design Singapore Council shared Forest & Whale’s most recent project Reuse, officially launching in August 2021, to combat the use of single-use plastic in Singaporean food courts, we couldn’t keep it to ourselves.

Founded in 2016 by Gustavo Maggio and Wendy Chua, Forest & Whale is a multi-disciplinary design studio based in Singapore. They design products and spatial experiences, with a focus on social and sustainable design and are passionate to bring circular thinking to products and systems through good design, ethnographic research and material exploration. Their work has earned the accolades of industry excellence awards including the Red Dot Design Award, Japan’s Good Design Award and the President’s Design Award from Singapore.

Over the past year Forest & Whale has been attempting to transform the convenience mindset ingrained in throwaway culture. Currently the studio is exploring compostable and edible materials to create takeaway containers to replace existing plastic versions. The plastic waste generated by single-use food containers aggravates ocean pollution, harms our planetary health and stresses waste management systems.

For cities that have organic composting facilities, Forest & Whale designed a salad container that is edible and can also be composted together with food waste, thus minimizing its end of life impact. Made of wheat husk for the base and PHA (a bacteria based composite) for the lid, both can be composted as food waste, without the need of any special infrastructure or industrial composting facility. And if the material accidentally went into the ocean it will fully decompose within 1-3 months, without any microplastic left behind.

TJ Girard is a sought-after food designer and creative consultant, celebrated for staging theatrical, interactive food + beverage experiences. She now resides in California where her creativity is solar powered! TJ writes the Design Milk column called Taste.