We have reached that phase in our lives that everything is just a tap away from our screened devices. Ordering clothes, furniture, groceries, and even food has become such a convenient process that now people living alone prefer takeout more than cooking.
People working from their homes during this pandemic and even before relied more on food takeouts from restaurants rather than cooking in their kitchen because who would waste their precious hour cooking a meal than drafting important emails and building potential presentations.
But how is this regular takeout treating the environment hasn’t been able to grasp the attention of all of us until now. People living in popular metro cities in India have been noticing the weather changes very recently. It is not only in India but also in countries like the US, which claim that they are doing everything to control this smoggy affair all around the cities.
One might assume that how food deliveries are rendering to more urban pollution around the environment? Experts have probably found the answers to this smog-like atmosphere in urban areas, and one of the factors is excessive plastic disposal.
The researchers from the National University of Singapore have proven that an increased number of food delivery has become one of the causes behind urban pollution due to plastics’ resultant-disposal. Although the researchers have given a very unusual relationship to increased plastic disposal and pollution, they said that the town’s smoggy atmosphere has made all the office goers rethink their decision to visit the office on that specific day.
The office workers choose to remain behind shut doors, work in their homes, and order takeout for lunch, and the packaging of these takeouts later adds up to an already overflowing stream of plastic waste.
The Research Done
The researchers from the National University of Singapore conducted the study considering the three cities from China: Beijing, Shenyang, and Shijiazhuang. According to the researchers, these three cities were the most polluted one in China. The experimentation was done explicitly in China, keeping in mind that food delivery is more famous in China compared to other countries.
If we believe the statistics, China has witnessed around 350 million registered users who are potential consumers for food takeout. More than half of 65 million food cans trashed every day is by office workers. These data made it essential for scholars to analyze the pollution level relation with food deliveries in China.
The researchers involved two other scholars in their study: Liu Haoming and Chu Junhong, and collected their data based on two factors,
- Surveying the lunch choice for 11 days in January and June 2018 for 251 workers from the above mentioned three cities in China.
- Data from an online food service where about 3.5 million food delivery orders were placed, and 3,50,000 users were from all the other market segments.
The researchers measured the study’s pollution level based on PM2.5, an abbreviation of fine particles less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter. While measuring it based on the United States’ standards, which accepts a maximum of 35 micrograms per cubic meter (μg/m3) level of low air quality, these three cities in China surpassed that air quality check, which made the pollution visibly apparent to the naked eye.
The research’s end-results revealed that a 100 μg/m3 increase in air pollution means a 7.2% rise in food orders from all the market segments. The study’s researchers also mentioned that whenever the pollution increased by 100 μg/m3, office workers ordered food deliveries six times more than the usual other market segments.
How are we connecting Food Delivery with Plastic Waste?
One of the researchers of the study Chu Junhong said,
Faced with smog or haze outside, a typical office worker at lunchtime can avoid exposure only by ordering food to be delivered to [their] doorstep.
The researchers later asked these surveyed offices- going participants to show pictures of the meal they ordered from the restaurant to observe the food packaging. The scholars analyzed that an average restaurant every day uses typically 6.6 grams of plastic, but the plastic usage double-up to 54 grams during their food takeout service.
The researchers concluded by saying that each time the smoggy weather prevails outside and increases, as a matter of fact, the plastic-usage and disposal increases by 10g, and to understand this concerning China’s everyday food ordering customers, it would be 2.5 million disposed plastic from 2.5 million people.
The study’s co-author, Dr. Haoming Liu, stated the validity of their research implying that,
Our findings probably apply to other typically polluted developing-nation cities, such as Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Waste management practices vary widely, with the wind blowing plastic debris away from uncovered landfills or plastic being discarded into rivers and from there into the ocean,
So, with 8 million tonnes of plastic estimated to enter the seas each year, our study speaks to a wider issue. Individuals protect themselves from — and show their distaste for — air pollution by ordering food delivery, which often comes in plastic packaging. It is evident from our study that air pollution control can reduce plastic waste,
The lead author of the study, Alberto Salvo of the university’s Department of Economics, mentioned Human behavior as the significant factor of increased plastic and air pollution worldwide. But it is essential to note that it is not so that in every country where there is an increase in the smoggy atmosphere, office goers prefer staying back home.
People travel to their offices, even in bad weather. So this study might not be very valedictory research in many cities based on the partial fact that people stay at their homes during bad smoggy weather. Instead, the counter-statement should be, How much food deliveries office goers are ordering in their office premises and not only in their homes?
