Metropolitan Market unveils compostable meat trays

Seattle's Metropolitan Markets have gone corny.

The chain says its Seattle stores are the first in the nation to introduce a completely compostable tray for fish, poultry and other meats. The trays are made from 100 percent corn and take only two months to decompose.

Brad Halverson, the store chain's vice president of marketing, said the market will encourage its customers to "drop the trays into their yard-waste or food bins" rather than into the trash or recycling. That way, the trays can be sent to Cedar Grove Composting and, within three or four months, the resulting compost soil can be resold to local residents for their gardens.

"It's another step toward not throwing stuff away," Dick Lilly, business area manager for waste prevention at Seattle Public Utilities, said of the trays. "Instead of these trays being garbage and being sent all the way to Oregon, they're composted."

The introduction of the compostable trays is in response to a new city ordinance that requires all single-use food-service packaging to be compostable or recyclable. The ordinance takes effect July 1.

The law could divert 6,000 tons of throwaway containers and food waste from going to landfills each year, Lilly said. It also would save a 100-car-long train from taking a trip to the landfill in Oregon. He has a feeling local residents will comply well, considering the city's overall environmental awareness: Last year, city businesses and residents composted about 80,000 tons of waste, and about 150,000 households in the city are able to compost the trays, along with yard waste and other food waste, right in their backyards.

Seattle is the first city to pass such an ordinance, though Lilly said San Francisco and Toronto have similar, but not as strict, packaging laws. Lilly hopes Seattle sets an example for other cities and encourages them to adopt the same regulations soon.

Metropolitan Market isn't the only grocery to make changes for the new ordinance. At Safeway on Lower Queen Anne, Assistant Manager Rudy Torres said they haven't replaced meat trays, but certain packaging products, such as the bags containing French bread and sourdough, will soon be completely compostable.

"We'll be able to throw away a lot of packaging in the same place as produce and meat, so it's going to be a lot better for the environment," Torres said.

Halverson said Metropolitan Market would have introduced the trays sooner if they could have, since they cost no more to produce than the current plastic foam ones, but science hadn't quite made the leap toward creating such a product until now. The trays will be introduced later at Metropolitan Market stores outside Seattle.

Dave Powell, the Northwest territory sales manager for food-service-packaging company Pactiv, said the bioplastic product has been two or three years in the making, and it became a reality only in the past few months.

"The tricky part has been to make it rigid enough" to hold food products, Powell said.

He added that the next challenge will be to create a compostable container that can hold hot beverages — the tray's material has a heat capacity of only 105 degrees, which won't accommodate hot coffee. Pactiv is also looking to create an equally compostable wrap to cover Metropolitan Market's meat and trays.

Halverson said, "We'll have to make sure people understand" that while the trays are compostable, the plastic wrap is not.

Jill Kimball: 206-464-2136 or jkimball@seattletimes.com