Food Delivery Apps Are Drowning China in Plastic | Hacker News Reader

Food Delivery Apps Are Drowning China in Plastic

nytimes.com

62 pointstysone63 comments

Pretty soon there will be a company delivering on regular, reusable plates. There will be a refund given if the plate is returned to the driver on the next delivery. (Thus encouraging a second delivery...) Higher refund if the plate is washed.

I feel like this could be an Onion article today, start-up in a year.

Or they just scoop out food onto your home plate. Like an on-demand food moped that has buffet sized compartments - that stay fresh for a couple of hours so the driver doesn't have to return to the shop as often. Hmm, anyone in the food business need some more ideas?

Ever heard about tiffin services in India, specially Mumbai? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala

That's very similar

Ha ha, yes. Seen them many times when in Mumbai. They are an "institution". IIM Ahmedabad and Harvard Business School have done case studies on them. They are supposed to be very organized and rarely make a mistake in delivery. There's even a Bollywood about them, The Lunchbox:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lunchbox

Asking customers to wash plates for your business sounds like a food safety violation waiting to happen. I'd skip that part.

Also be sure to either make the reusable utensils/plates very visually unappealing or factor their cost into the delivery; if you provide them as any sort of loss-leader you may find yourself as much a provider of inexpensive tableware as you are a provider of food.

Violation in the US, maybe not in China.

No one says the business can't wash the plates themselves as well.

I guess the food-delivery industry could use some disruption. The plates would be cheap bento-boxes for easy stacking, possibly with some kind barcode for keeping track of them. The most benefit would come from groups of restaurants who work together to implement the same system and allow a more dynamic handling of the boxes.

Has anyone's grandparents used Schwan's?

I've been thinking about this and it would be good if there was a 3rd party that provided standard sized, good quality re-usable containers to restaurants. If you want to buy food from the restaurant you need an account with this new container company. When you buy food from a restaurant, if you don't have enough credit with the container company, the cost of a container is added to your order (something like $10 so that de-incentivises people to bin it after use). There would need to be a lot of drop off locations for used containers, if they were standard sized they could probably be washed automatically by machines to be returned to restaurants. Each container would be uniquely identifiable and your account would be credited a drop-off.

This would only work if a local government put restrictions in place banning single use plastics at restaurants. I don't think cutlery is necessary in most cases, especially for home delivery.. you can use your own cutlery people.

This sounds great, but I fear that nothing stops China from producing literal mountains of trash. Proof of that is the mountains of abandoned shared bikes.

I keep thinking that the next big revolution in food sales will be reusable, washable containers.

Use glass instead of plastic so they're safe for industrial washers, make them in a variety of sizes such as tall narrow ones for sauces and beverages and squat and wide ones for casseroles and soups. Tight lids for safe storage and transportation. Standardized sizes for easy reuse and transferability.

We can call them "mason jars".

Personally only seen it once during a short trip but apparently this is common in Seoul (maybe someone can confirm if it’s really widespread or not?). Delivery food comes in reusable containers, you leave it outside your door when you’re done and at some point the next day it all gets collected and sent back to the original restaurant for cleaning and reuse.

This used to be universal for Chinese delivery in Korea. With the rise of delivery apps it's not as universal as it used to be but it's still fairly easy to see.

That would only fly in China if there were some hard to fake signifier of cleanliness. You already see old ladies rinsing ceramic dishware in gutter water and shrinkwrapping them for reuse, where shrinkwrap signifies the plate "is" clean

In Chinese university cafeterias, you had to pay 1, 2, or 5 mao (I don’t remember the exact amount, this was 15 years ago, probably more now anyways) if you don’t bring your own food container to hold the food you get.

Perhaps permanent containers could be used for food delivery charges on a deposit basis (pay money for them, get it back when they are returned, perhaps sent back on a future delivery).

The economic incentive needs to be large enough to matter.

When we order food deliveries, there's usually an option to specify how many set of utensils we want. We specify zero. If there's no option, we write something similar in the 'notes' section.

These instructions are almost always ignored. I guess it's cheaper for them to add utensils in every order, than to spend time to read the specifics of each order.

Government regulation is a quick substitute for economic incentive. Mandate that delivery services have to charge $$ per box or utensil, and you'll see the counts drop pretty quick. Same happens in grocery stores in several states in the US.

Yup. But enforcement isn't easy.

Consider this: in the US and UK, sales tax (or VAT) is mostly enforced via the threat of a random audit. In China, official receipts can only be issued on government-issued stationery, printed using computers that are connected to the tax bureau. The threat of random audits is too weak, and open to corruption and uneven enforcement.

The feature of specifying no utensils is mentioned by one of those major platforms in the article. It looks like they are using it to be able to claim that they are promoting more sustainable practices, rather than actually do something about it.

Oh! Sorry, only skimmed the start.

The platforms themselves may have good intentions, but it's not reasonable to expect them to enforce that with restaurants. I mean, if restaurants want to give customers stuff for free, and customers don't complain, then it's hard to blame the platform.

For food delivery, India's tiffin tins are pretty hard to beat. Reusable, washable and will last years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiffin_carrier

The trick is how to get them to the delivery people without requiring an inefficient double round trip.

Have two boxes. The courier delivers one and picks up the other.

I worked at a food startup for a while.

Turns out local (Swiss) regulations prohibited a food delivery van to carry both refrigerated fresh food and unrefrigerated, dirty containers at the same time.

The company really wanted to push towards reusable containers, but that would legally require making two trips, so it could never be economical.

Add a trailer?

Pick-up on last drop-off. Like glass milk bottles.

I actually just go eat at restaurants because of this. It's pretty bad as a society when going out to eat food has become difficult for some people. Really, ordering delivery is not much else besides pure laziness.

Maybe in the case you're sick or something, sure, but for most cases going to a restaurant isn't that difficult.

Eating at restaurants all the time might be something many Americans can afford to do, but it’s not normal for the rest of the world. I’m in the UK and tend to eat out about once a week as a treat. That’s on the “doing well” end of things.

I didn't mean to suggest that people should be able to afford to eat out, I meant, if you have the money to spend on a bunch of take away, then why not just go eat at the store?

Maybe you're suggesting that take away is cheaper than eating at a store?

Ah, makes sense now. Eating out usually is more expensive than getting a takeaway delivered - maybe not a like for like on the main but it’s usually once you add a couple of alcoholic drinks. You’ll get charged for a glass of wine what you’d pay for the bottle at home.

Different economies scale differently depending on cost of labour.

The higher the cost of labour, the higher the multiplier is for going to a restaurant.

e.g. (my local prices): * frozen pizza (ham): ~1.50-3.00 CHF * fridge-ready pizza (ham): ~6-8 CHF * Domino's: ~13-16 CHF * local Italian eatery (no table service): ~14-18 CHF * Restaurant: ~13-30 CHF

I order from local places but I go pick it up myself while doing other errands. Helps put money into local business while I avoid tip/delivery fees.

Why just China? Wouldn’t the same be true in the US too?

Scales are completely different. Food delivery is a lot more ubiquitous in China than in the USA.

I mean food delivery is becoming massively more popular each year w DoorDash, UberEats, Grubhub, Postmates, etc. collectively worth tens of billions. The trend is up and to the right. I believe in terms of annual deliveries the US is probably smaller but not that much smaller.

Is it? It is more popular then before, but not like China. From my time living in China, I can personally attest to the ubiquity of food delivery services at an easily affordable price. In contrast, it just doesn’t seem to be worth it back in the states, the service isn’t as good and it is way more expensive than in China, it is easier to just go out.

"Easier" is a weird word choice here. It's absolutely easier to not move from the couch, naked in your robe, and have restaurant-quality food arrive at your door than it is to sit down at a restaurant and fake some temporary civility across town. No contest if you have young kids.

It's not even much more expensive since the sit-down tip is replaced with a delivery premium. And I only tip the driver some bucks.

You ever notice how most Chinese restaurants in the US (especially in larger cities) have always delivered anyway, even before services like Seamless? The same is true of almost every small restaurant in China; the apps really only expand the delivery area and make it more convenient.

I've recently read somewhere that market penetration of food delivery in the US is c. 3%, compared to c. 4% in UK (due to takeaway culture?) and c. 11% in China.

Trying to find actual source, but this was from a recent analyst report...

That seems to suggest people in China are receiving deliveries from restaurants within walking distance. Quality of food gets worse the longer it sits in a portable container. Chinese food especially. Deliveries are unlikely to travel much distance, given the traffic condition of Chinese cities.

In this vein, are there any company's currently selling viable compostable/biodegradable plastics? I know there is a big drive for straws, but packaging of fruit, vegetables (and food) is an important target as well.

Many of them, but it is like 10x more expensive than regular one used today. Biodegradable plastic is an old thing, just too expensive for us. It’s cheaper to dump European garbage in Asia with explanation “they bought it from us”. I am just shaking my head when reading article about German apple bags from the Asian beaches. We are even forced here to sort our waste. Funny thing is that bio waste goes to these expensive biodegradable bags. And then German apple bags and all other clean(!) plastic waste go to separate bag that apparently is recycled.

> separate bag that apparently is recycled

This is a common misconception. The yellow bin (Gelbe Tonne) is not about recycling at all. The point is that, in Germany, producers of packaging need to pay a fee per packaging that goes towards disposing of the used packaging, through the Green Dot (Grüner Punkt) system. The yellow bin is therefore paid by them, as opposed to by consumers.

This is why the yellow bin is not being described as accepting specific materials, it's explicitly described as accepting packaging (both plastic and paper/carton).

When you put a non-packaging plastic item into the yellow bin, it counts as an "intelligent misthrow" (intelligenter Fehlwurf), which is one of my favorite pieces of jargon.

> In this vein, are there any company's currently selling viable compostable/biodegradable plastics?

That will increase the cost by an unignorable margin and even that, some biodegradable plastics still take a long time (a year or even years) to be gradated.

This is the reason of why things like reusable plates etc is currently the best way to go. That is, when those reusable items actually gets returned.

I don't get it. There are excellent leakproof cardboard takeout containers available.

They may cost a little more. Is this another example of leave a mess behind for the future to pay for?

> They may cost a little more

So you do get it.

Unfortunately, the pricing doesn't capture the true cost of the negative externalities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative

I'm pretty sure the cardboard boxes you are thinking of have a layer of plastic on them. The only cardboard boxes I've seen from to go places without any plastic turn soggy within 30 minutes or so even without anything liquid in them (just a poke bowl).

This is still a pretty good solution. The amount of plastic used is cut dramatically, obviously, and as long as the containers are made correctly they can still be recycled in a normal paper process.

Is cardboard that is dirtied with food oils actually recyclable? I thought this is not the case.

If it's made correctly, yes. Pizza boxes aren't (because they aren't coated, so the oil soaks in), but e.g. orange juice cartons are.

Orange juice cartons are surely plastic-lined or foil-lined too though

Right, which is why recyclability depends on the way they're made. The PE formulation used for things like juice cartons in the US can be broken down when the cartons are pulped.

Someone will come up with something. I'm starting to see Bamboo straws in AZ because CA outlawed plastic straws. The companies that are making these alternative products are having a boon because of the new laws. If we required take out packaging to not include styrofoam or plastic in a couple years I bet there would be some incredible innovations.

In the UK, takeaways used to pretty much universally deliver in soft, perhaps tin or aluminium, containers with cardboard lids. Around 10-15 years ago, restaurants started switching to plastic. Some still use the old-style containers. If those are more ecologically sound, perhaps the government here should ban the plastic ones.

Perhaps you should read the article? It's not about the cost, the restaurants don't want to risk a bad review and would rather wrap everything in one more layer of plastic. And not sure if you're aware but people from developing countries generally care less about being environmentally friendly than in devekoped countries.

I was thinking, is it not possible to have all garbage be filtered for plastic, not plastic before after it is collected.

This way you don’t put the burden on the people trying to ‘sort’ plastic from non plastic. Let the machine do it with some mix of computer vision or some other sensors. I wish to work on a startup like this because I feel this is something that must be done if not done already.

More plastic but it's easy to clean - recycle.

At least more delivery = less traffic, less polution

Both of those statements are wrong.

Only 10% of all plastic is recycled.

More delivery means less people cooking for themselves at home, which means more traffic and pollution.

There was a time when milk was delivered in glass bottles.

Well we know where some of those containers end up.

China has at least 3-6 of 10 rivers that carry 90% of plastic polluting the Oceans.

https://news.sky.com/story/just-10-rivers-carry-90-of-plasti...

From the article:

Yangtze River, China

This was the worst offender, according to research published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. It carries up to 1.5 million tonnes of plastic into the sea every year. In contrast, the Thames puts 18 tonnes of plastic into the ocean.

Yellow River, China

After the Yangtze and the Yenisei, this is the third-longest river in Asia - and the sixth-longest river system in the world. It flows through nine provinces before emptying into the Bohai Sea.

Hai he River, China

This waterway connects Beijing to Tianjin and the Bohai Sea. Its annual flow is only one-thirtieth the Yangtze's, and half that of the Yellow River.

Out of control......

China imported half the worlds plastic waste until 2017. No one in the west who sells it to them has any illusions about where it goes.. since China placed an import ban on it, undoubtedly they will sell it to someone else who does the same thing or pollute the water themselves. Its awfully convenient to pay someone else to do the dirty work and then turn your nose up at them.

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