Ed Lehrburger of PureVision Technology with a drum of bagasse, a sugar cane waste product used to make ethanol fuel — and biodegradable lunch trays. (Photo: Kevin Moloney for The New York Times)
Opponents of the use of polystyrene trays in New York City public schools have a new idea: sugar cane.
Councilman Bill de Blasio joined students and parents today at Public School 154 in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, to announce a privately financed pilot project to replace foam lunch trays with an environmentally friendly model made of bagasse, the fiber left after the extraction of the sugar-bearing juice from sugar cane.
The school has been the source of a grass-roots movement that began in June to curb or ban the use of polystyrene, a petroleum-based material that can take millennia to decompose. New York City’s public school system goes through 850,000 polystyrene cafeteria trays a day, 4 million in a week and more than 153 million in a school year.
The bagasse trays break down within 45 days in landfills or household composts. Two private companies — Brooklyn Properties, a real estate agency, and the Juice Box, a wine store on Prospect Avenue that is run by parents of a student at Public School 154 — are sponsoring the experiment.
“I want to applaud the parents of my district for what they’ve done to make P.S. 154 an environmental leader,” said Mr. de Blasio, a public school parent and member of the City Council’s Environmental Protection Committee.
“It is deeply troubling that the Department of Education knowingly purchases and uses million of Styrofoam trays a year despite the fact that Styrofoam is extremely harmful to our environment and creates massive amounts of waste,” said Mr. de Blasio, who has announced plans to run for Brooklyn borough president in 2009. (Technically, the trays are not Styrofoam, the common trade name for a polystyrene building insulation material made by the Dow Chemical Company.)
Mr. de Blasio has introduced a bill in Council that would ban the use of polystyrene by city agencies, including the school system, and private businesses. The cities of Berkeley, Calif., and Portland, Ore., are among the jurisdictions that have passed such bans, the city councilman said in a news release.
Officials at the city’s Education Department have said they are open to reconsidering the use of polystyrene trays, but have expressed concerns about cost.
City Room had another question: Might trays made from left-over processed sugar cane be tempting to hungry schoolchildren?
“It decomposes in 45 days,” said Jean Weinberg, a spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio, who did not miss a beat. “I did not try to eat it myself.”
