![]() William Dart began experimenting with creating cups from polystyrene, a material with seemingly magical insulating properties that would serve the growing fast-food industry.Ĭhick-fil-A was one of Dart’s first major accounts. In the late 1950s, brimming with ideas about plastic, he returned to his father’s welding factory in Mason, a small city next to Lansing. Dart did not invent foam cups, but he did master their mass production.Īfter returning from World War II and graduating from the University of Michigan, William Dart spent a year working for DuPont chemical company. The costs are low because foam is 95% air and can be made using relatively little raw plastic. The same properties that can make foam an environmental problem also make it profitable to manufacture. “A paper cup, as far as I know, has never killed any sea creatures,” said Jan Dell, an engineer who used to work in the plastics industry and now runs the Last Beach Cleanup, an advocacy group focused on plastic pollution. But the harm that plastic pollution can inflict on marine life is immediate, environmentalists say. Industry and academic experts are still debating how best to quantify the long-term effect that single-use containers made from varying materials - plastics, paper, glass - can have on climate change. Various Dart brand cups sit on a table in Chicago on Oct. For humans, plastic fibers have been found in everything from drinking water to table salt, though the long-term health consequences are still being studied. The company says overall sales of food and beverage containers, which generate $3 billion in annual revenue, are essentially flat.Įven as the market for polystyrene shrinks, many environmental groups want to abolish foam entirely because if it ends up as litter, it can break down easily into small pieces, harming fish and animals that ingest it. Today, foam makes up only a fifth of all the products that Dart sells. It is also experimenting with containers that can be composted or fashioned from recycled content. Polystyrene foam sales have been declining, and the company has been broadening its offerings to include more paper products, including coffee cups sold at Starbucks and Dunkin’. The backlash against foam is taking its toll. “If you just give up on foam,” said Michael Westerfield, director of recycling at Dart, “what are they going to want to do next?” By Dart’s reasoning, most materials inflict some negative effect on the environment, so it doesn’t make sense to ban one and not another. Dart says that critics of polystyrene are ignoring the negative environmental effects of other products, like many paper cups, which are derived from trees and can emit greenhouse gases as they degrade in landfills. The interview was one of the first times Dart had allowed a journalist broad access to its facilities on a leafy campus in Mason, where there are running trails, a garden honoring employees and boulders inscribed with words like “Meritocracy.”ĭart is waging a broader campaign to argue that its products are being used as scapegoats for a society fueled by on-the-go consumerism. “We don’t believe there are good, objective reasons to single out certain materials,” Dart’s chief executive officer, Jim Lammers, said in a recent interview at the company’s headquarters. The city is now performing that analysis. San Diego recently decided to suspend enforcement of its polystyrene ban in the face of a lawsuit by Dart and a restaurant trade group, which argued the city should have conducted a detailed environmental impact study before enacting the law. ![]() Shortly after Maryland voted to ban foam, Dart shut down its two warehouses in the state, displacing 90 workers and sending a signal to other locales considering similar laws. While many plastics companies work to protect their product through trade groups and feel-good marketing campaigns, Dart is challenging regulation directly and aggressively. The Dart company has four locations in Illinois, one in Chicago and three others in the suburbs.īut Dart Container, which has been owned by the Dart family since its founding in 1950s, is not backing down. In Chicago, an alderman in January introduced a plan to get rid of plastic foam food packaging in local restaurants and reduce the use of other plastic products, such as utensils and straws. Unprinted rolls of paper in Dart’s manufacturing facility in Chicago on Oct. ![]()
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