Reducing Food and Dinnerware Waste: 3 Tips to Choosing Sustainable Event Catering

11 May 2017
 Categories: Food & Cooking, Blog

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Food waste and serving ware waste take a tremendous toll on the environment. If you're aware of the amount of waste that is produced each day, you should consider doing your part for the environment by looking for a party catering service that is sustainable. Here are three tips on how you and the party caterers can limit your contributions and impact on the environment.

Choose Catering Services That Work With Organic, Seasonal, and Locally Grown Food

The carbon footprint of food is separated into two major categories. 11% goes towards the transportation of food whereas 83% goes towards how the food is grown. Sustainable party catering will choose to use ingredients that are not only locally grown, but also organically grown and seasonal. These ingredients use up the least amount of carbon emissions, and also tend to be the most flavorful and delicious. Don't hesitate to ask the party catering services where they get their food from to get a better idea on how sustainable their services are.

Reduce Waste With Reusable Dinnerware, Tablecloths, and Napkins

The numbers are staggering and almost unbelievable, but Americans throw away approximately 25 billion styrofoam cups and every year and 2.5 million plastic beverage bottles every hour. That's a lot of waste. Avoid contributing to this pileup of waste in landfills by choosing party catering services that rely on reusable dinnerware, tablecloths and napkins instead. These reusable items will also make the party appear a lot more elegant and sophisticated. To lower the party catering costs, you can ask your guests to help clean these items when they're done.

Establish a Feasible Way to Take Care of Pre- and Post-Consumer Food Waste

It's unavoidable. No matter how much you plan and how diligently you get people to RSVP to the event in hopes of ordering just enough food, you'll almost always end up with waste. Create a plan on how you and the party caterers will deal with both pre- and post-consumer food waste. You can ask charities and shelters ahead of time whether they would be interested in taking pre-consumer food waste. If not, place a notice online to see whether any local residents would like to bring some food home. As for post-consumer food waste, figure out how the food can be best composted in order to have the least amount of impact on the environment.

When it comes to food and party catering, try to be as sustainable as you can and produce as little waste as possible. There are many different ways that you can do so, and many party caterers will even provide you with some recommendations on how to achieve just that. Talk to caterers like Marians Island Wide Catering for more information.