Paper & Plastic Dishes

INDUSTRIAL CODES

NAICS: 32-2215 Nonfolding Sanitary Food Container Manufacturing, 32-6140 Polystyrene Foam Product Manufacturing, 32-6199 Plastic Products Manufacturing, not elsewhere classified

SIC: 2656 Sanitary Food Containers, 3086 Plastics Foam Products, 3089 Plastics Products, not elsewhere classified

NAICS-Based Product Codes: 32-22153, 32-22155, 32-2215W, 32-614005, 32-61993, 32-6199B111, and 32-6199B125

PRODUCT OVERVIEW

Paper and plastic dishes, alongside ancillary products like disposable cutlery and drinking straws, are characteristically modern product in that they have functionalities once achievable only with expensive materials. The eating utensils, dishes, and drinking containers we routinely use are made of metals, ceramics, thick plastics, and artfully shaped wood. Thus they are fairly expensive. Before the twentieth century only such reusable dishware was available. Too valuable to throw away they imposed, and still impose, the labor of cleaning them after use. With the emergence of disposable tableware early in the twentieth century a new era dawned and, in effect, made casual eating and drinking, often on the run, routine. Tableware cheap enough emerged so that a host can spend as little as 30 to 60 cents per guest for plate, cup, and cutlery. The lower end represents paper, the higher end represents implements made of plastics. These objects can go directly into a lined garbage can after the casual meal is eaten. Very little clean-up is necessary. The cost of tableware is a small fraction of the host's expenditures on food and drink.

The major materials used to make disposable tableware—paper and plastic—also revolutionized packaging so that, in the food distribution sector, the package in which the food is delivered may also be the tableware in which it is eaten. Two examples are food sold in serving cups, such as puddings or yogurts, and meals intended to be microwaved in their own trays. One of the largest users of disposable tableware is the fast food industry. One of its most common so-called dishes is the foam plastic container which acts as the delivery packing as well as the dispensing plate.

Plastics are one of the most versatile materials ever developed by humanity. The material is with us everywhere in solid objects such as films and fabrics, as coatings, and as foams. Within the foodservice category, solid plastics have become the material of choice for permanent tableware and are also the dominant materials in disposable cups. So many dishes are made of plastics that measuring the role of plastics in the disposables category is difficult. Lines of demarcation between permanent and throwaway products are also difficult to draw.

This essay deals narrowly with disposables used in serving food and drink, thus with plates and drinking cups, cup-shaped containers intended to be used in eating the products they contain, larger disposable platters and bowls, foam trays used in fast foodservice, trays which are the structural support of ready-to-eat meals, straws used for drinking, and throw-away-cutlery. Kitchenware is excluded although disposables play a role in cooking as well. So are plastic dishes intended to be washed after meals and used many times.

Origins

Among the materials industries the paper sector ushered in the age of the disposables. The opportunity to provide convenience and to improve public hygiene motivated the early innovators.

The inventor of the paper plate was Martin Keyes of Lempster, New Hampshire. Keyes introduced a product made of molded paper pulp in 1903. He brought it to market a year later as the first product of the Keyes Fibre Company that he formed with partners specifically to manufacture paper plates. Others had made such plates before by stamping out the plates from sheet paper; the products had poor dimensional stability, folded the wrong way easily when loaded, and could not get traction in the market. Plates made of pressed pulp shaped in molds had greater structural stability. Keyes' own inspiration for the product was seeing workers at a wood veneer plant where he worked eating their lunches off sheets of maple veneer—and then tossing these aside after the meal. Keyes' motive was to provide convenience.

Paper cups had a similar history although they originated a little later. The two names associated with the paper cups were those of Lawrence Luellen and Hugh Moore, both of Boston, Massachusetts. Luellen developed the first cup made of stiff, seamed paperboard. Little paper sacks had preceded cups but had to be opened by hand first, had little stability, and could not be set down. Such cup-substitutes are still around and represent the bottom of the category. Hugh Moore, working with Luellen, began manufacturing sturdy paper cups next door to a toy factory that made dolls called dixies. Moore liked the word, it reminded him of a $10 bank note issued by a New Orleans bank, the word dix (French for ten) printed in its center. With the consent of the Dixie Doll Company, which had no objection to the use of its name on a cup, the Dixie cup was born and remains with us still. The paper cup brought health benefits to the public. Until it became the standard dispenser repeat use cups or ladles, typically made of tin, had been employed next to fountains with questionable hygienic consequences. In 1912, when the paper cup became visible in the market, it was first sold under the name of Health Kup by Moore's Individual Drinking Cup Company.

By the time plastics emerged into common use, the disposable dish category was already well established. Plastics thus penetrated an existing market. Polystyrene was the earliest contender and remains a major substance used in disposable cups and tableware. A German apothecary named Eduard Simon discovered styrene in Berlin in 1839. Plastics, however, did not reach consumer markets until materials shortages during World War II stimulated their widespread development as substitutes, especially for rubber. In the decade after World War II discoveries made during the war led to the commercial exploitation of plastics. Plastic cups were the first to surface in the foodservice category.

Styrene is a compound formed of eight carbon and eight hydrogen atoms but arranged in an interesting way. The core of the compounds is a circular benzene ring (six carbons holding six hydrogens) to which a vinyl group is linked. A vinyl group consists of a carbon-hydrogen pairing (CH) attached to a carbon and two hydrogens (CH₂). Many such formations joined in a repeating chain are called a polymer. The vinyl group is present in other plastics as well, including polyvinyl acetate and polyvinyl chloride (PVC). A Dow Chemicals Company researcher, Ray McIntire, developed a polystyrene foam in 1954 and gave the world the Styrofoam cup. Plastic plates, spoons, forks, and knives are made of solid polystyrene. Polystyrene is a versatile chemical in that it appears clear but may be colored virtually any hue; it is very light in a foam version and provides very good insulating qualities; it is strong and stiff as a solid; it can be recycled although recycled polystyrene is not used in food-grade products. Since the 1950s plastics use in disposable tableware has expanded beyond polystyrene to include polypropylene, used for hot liquids, and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) another clear plastic used widely in this product cluster.

Food-grade packaging materials require approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Sanitary board is regulated based on bacterial content of the board after production. Plastics are rated based on migration of chemicals into the food if heat is present. Therefore, containers intended to be placed in microwave ovens must be made with FDA-approved materials.

Product Array

Products in this category are categorized both by material and by function. Functionally they are cups, plates, dishes, cutlery, lids, and straws. Each of these categories may be made of paper or of plastics, but one or the other material tends to be dominant. In general, plastics dominate the cups, cutlery, lids, and straws categories. Paper has a strong presence in cups, dominates the plates category in consumer and foodservice uses, and has a minor share in the cutlery, lids, and straws categories. Both paper and plastic are used for dishes designed to serve things like banana splits and hot dogs.

In general plastic plates, dishes, and solid cups cost more than their paper equivalents. Foam cups cost less than paper cups. Except at the high end of paper products and the low end of plastics, where the two products have similar prices per unit, plastic products will be minimally 60 percent more expensive than paper products. Wholesale merchants therefore offer these products separately by category and by material. Categories offered by foodservicedirect.com, for example, are (in alphabetical order) foam cups and plastic lids (23 categories), paper cups and plastic lids (54 categories), paper food containers (11), paper plates (24), plastic and wooden cutlery (41 categories including wooden ice cream spoons and chopsticks), plastic bowls (12), plastic cups and plastic lids (44), plastic food containers (20), plastic plates and platters (19), and portion cups (paper and plastic both, 12 categories). The wholesaler offers the products of all leading producers. This listing shows the diversity of products and the large number of categories involved. The categories often contain multiple products based on size or functional grouping.

Industry Structure

The industry producing disposable tableware has two basic layers. The first is represented by producers of basic raw materials, thus pulp, contain-erboard, and plastic resins. The second is represented by converters who use these materials to make products. Producers of raw materials may themselves make products. Materials producers who convert typically also supply other converters.

Viewed from a materials perspective and measured in dollars, products made of plastics represent 80 percent of shipments and those made of paper 20 percent. Viewed from a functional point of view, cups represent 73 percent of the industry and all other products represent 27 percent. The dominance of cups is due to the much wider distribution of liquid consumption in the society. Although disposable plates and cutlery are routinely used in cafeterias serving institutional settings (office buildings, schools, hospitals, and similar places), disposable cups have a much wider reach. They are used every day to dispense liquids in vending machines and to serve liquids in lower-end foodservice establishments, cafeterias, drugs stores, soda shops, ice cream parlors, and in many other situations of routine casual beverage consumption, hot or cold. Disposable cups are ubiquitous in casual private entertaining as well. They are routinely used when three or more people are invited to a party, a family event, or at communal picnics. Cups are also consumed in large quantities at ballparks, fair grounds, and other venues of outdoors entertainment. Plastic cups represent 90 percent of all disposable cups sold, and of this portion solid plastics represent 79 percent and foam cups 21 percent of dollar shipments.

Based on the reporting of major companies in the industry, 65 percent to 70 percent of production is sold to the foodservice industry, including fast food companies and organizations that prepare ready-to-eat food. Between 30 percent and 35 percent of the product is sold to the public directly through grocery chains and mass merchandisers. In the foodservice sector, paper and plastic plates, dishes, and containers tend to have dual functions. They package the product and also serve as tableware during its consumption; the two functions are thus somewhat blurred in use. Companies producing ready-to-heat meals, for instance, make food intended to be delivered on a plate that is used in three ways; as a packaging for delivery, as a vessel in which the food is heated, and as the tableware from which the food is consumed.

MARKET

The U.S. Bureau of the Census collects data on paper and plastic dishes as barely visible subcomponents of three industries. They are barely visible because details are reported only for years ending in 7 and 2. The three industries are Sanitary Board Manufacturing (NAICS 32-2215), which includes the major paper products; Polystyrene Foam Manufacturing (NAICS 32-6140), which carries foam-based cups and plates; and the Bureau's Miscellaneous Plastics industry category (NAICS 32-6119), which reports on disposable plastic cups among other plastic products. Solid plastic plates, dishes, and cutlery are not visible in this last industry (or anywhere else) because they are included without differentiation in a category the Census Bureau calls plastics dinnerware and tableware. Most of the objects included in that category are permanent rather than disposable products.

Disposable plastic plates and serving dishes occupy the high end of our product category used in those foodservice settings where standard products (high-quality paper and foam) are not quite good enough but using permanent dishes is not indicated either. Thus these products are typically used in certain catering situations and at up-scale parties. In the absence of reliable data, we have included this category by assuming that one half of one percent of the Census Bureau's plastic dinnerware and tableware product grouping represents disposable plastics. All other numbers cited are either taken directly from product reporting in 1997 and in 2002 or estimated from larger aggregates available for all other years. The market numbers shown are industrial shipments rather than retail values. Retail equivalents are at least double the dollar values shown.

The total market for paper and plastic dishes in 1997 was $5.9 billion. Shipments increased at an annual rate of 4.4 percent reaching a level of $8.5 billion in 2005. The paper-based portion of this market was 22.3 percent of 1997 shipments and slipped to 20 percent by 2005. Plastics were gaining market share during this period. All paper products had shipments of $1.3 billion at the beginning of the period and $1.7 billion in 2005, showing a growth of 3.0 percent per year. Plastics increased their share of shipments from 77.7 percent in 1997 to 80 percent in 2005. Shipments increased from $4.6 billion (1997) to $6.8 billion (2005) growing at the rate of 6.0 percent per year. The trends in this industry mirror the broader competition between paper and plastics in packaging, with plastics gaining share at a slow but relentless rate despite more rapidly rising raw materials costs for plastics than for paper, generally due to the upward spiraling costs of petroleum.

The broad pattern of shipments over the 1997–2005 period is shown in Figure 163. The graphic clearly shows both the dominance of cups in this product sector and the dominance and growth of plastics. In 2005 shipments of cups were valued at $6.2 billion, nearly 73 percent of the entire category. Of this total solid plastic cups accounted for $4.2 billion, polystyrene foam cups for $1.1 billion, and paper cups for $843 million. Both paper and foam cups have exhibited negative growth since 1997, paper cups declining at the annual rate of 0.7 percent, and foam cups at 0.5 percent. The slack was taken up by solid plastic products that may be made of solid polystyrene, polypropylene, or PET. Polystyrene foam plates and dishes had the most dramatic growth in this period, moving from $410 million in 1997 to $1.4 billion in 2005, growing 16.9 percent annually. These products are light, inexpensive, and perform reasonably well in most casual applications. Paper plates and dishes also exhibited strong growth, 8.6 percent per year, increasing from $442 million in 1997 to $855 million in 2005. If we combine paper and plastic dishes and cutlery, these products had a faster growth, 13.1 percent per year, as compared with cups, which grew at 2.4 percent annually. Americans were increasingly adopting a casual lifestyle which appears to account for the growth in shipments of paper and plastic dishes. Cups, by contrast, had long since achieved a high rate of saturation and were influenced during this period most by the growing trend of bottled water consumption.

A look at material and product shares is provided in Figure 164, depicting the situation in 2005. The Census Bureau reported U.S. plastic dinnerware and tableware shipments at $1.7 billion in 1997 and at $2.7 billion in 2006, growing at 6.0 percent per year. This category competes directly with china, thus porcelain and other vitreous products, most of which is imported. Apparent consumption of ceramic tableware in 2005 was around $1.1 billion, made up of domestic shipments valued at $300 and imports of $776 million. Plastics dominate total sales of dinnerware and tableware in the United States. Included in Figure 164 is a mere sliver of this industry (0.5 percent) to serve as a placeholder for solid plastic dishes and cutlery, thus $8 million in 1997 and $13 million in 2005. The value of this segment is at least as high as shown but may be considerably higher. No data are available, however, to justify a particular level.

Market Influences

Growth trends in this industry appear to be correlated to consumption of fast foods and indirectly to lifestyle changes favoring rapid food preparation. Casual eating often involves disposables. In the 1997–2005 period, for instance, snack food consumption grew at a rate of 5.5 percent per year whereas total food consumption increased at the much more sedate rate of 3.0 percent yearly. In the roughly comparable 1995–2004 period, revenues of the fast food industry grew at a rate just above that of the paper and plastics tableware market, thus at 4.9 percent per year. This industry, which is the largest market for disposable paper and plastic foodservice products, had, during this period, made efforts to reduce its consumption of packaging materials—replacing foam containers with simpler wrappers, for instance.

Undergirding the growth in fast food consumption are changes in lifestyle typically described by the public in negative terms as longer work hours and declining leisure time. The Families and Work Institute reported that dual-earner couples worked ten more hours per week in 2002 than they did in 1997, ninety-one hours in 2002 versus eighty-one in 1997. According to population data from the Census Bureau, households headed by a single parent increased by 8.6 million, from 9 million in 1997 to 17.6 million in 2002. Single parents have less time for formal meals and are more likely to prepare ready-to-eat meals in the microwave oven, meals that arrive on disposable dishes. The Economic Research Service, an element of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, assembled data showing that people in 1965 spent 30 percent of their food budgets on eating out. In 1975 the percentage had increased to 36 percent, in 1985 to 41 percent, in 1995 to 46 percent, and in 2005 had reached nearly half (48%) of family food budget.

KEY PRODUCERS/MANUFACTURERS

Solo

Solo Cup Company, headquartered in Highland Park, Illinois, is a publicly held corporation which concentrates exclusively on disposable tableware and packaging for the consumer and for the foodservices sector. With 2006 revenue of $2.49 billion, Solo is also the largest domestically-based company in this specialty. The company began as Paper Container Manufacturing Company in Chicago in the 1930s. Solo was initially the brand name of a cone cup the company introduced in the 1940s. The cup was so popular that the company renamed itself Solo. A reported 81 percent of the company's revenues are from the foodservices sector, 19 percent from sales directly to the consumer. Solo has a comprehensive line of products in both plastic and paper implementations at every price point and also does private label manufacturing. The company's brands are Solo, Sweetheart, Sensations, Creative Expressions, Jack Frost, Trophy, and Hoffmaster. The last is a brand of table napkins and table covers.

Pactiv Corporation

Pactiv is the most recent name for Packaging Corporation of America founded in 1965 as a subsidiary of Tenneco Inc. In 1995 the company became Tenneco Packaging Inc. In 1999 Tenneco spun off the company and it became Pactiv Corporation. Pactiv had total revenues in 2006 of $2.9 billion of which a large portion was earned in producing disposable products for the foodservices sector as well as disposable table wear sold directly to consumers. On the consumer side of the business (34%) the company's main products are paper bags, foam trays, solid plastic containers, and aluminum packaging. The company's best-known brand is Hefty. Its disposable tableware is sold under the Hefty, Serve 'n Store, and Easy Grip names. Hefty is the leading brand of disposable plates followed by Dixie Everyday (made by Georgia-Pacific) and Chinet (made by Huhtamaki). Pactiv's sales to the foodservice sector were $1.8 billion in 2006. The company participates in both paper and plastic products.

Huhtamaki

The Finnish company, Huhtamäki Oyj had sales of €2.3 billion ($3.0 billion) in 2006. Huhtamaki (the name the company uses internationally) realized 31 percent of its sales in the Americas, most of that in the United States. The company's revenues were derived 66 percent from consumer products and 34 percent from foodservice. Huhtamaki thus inverts the pattern common with most of the other participants in the business who sell more to foodservice than to the consumer directly. The company began in the 1920s as a candy producer, went through a conglomerated phase in which it was involved, with significant success, in candy, other food products, health care, women's clothing, heavy engineering, advertising, and electronics. The company entered the paper cup business in 1965. Beginning in 1988 Huhtamaki began to concentrate its business around confectionary, pharmaceuticals, and packaging. It sold off its confectionary and pharmaceuticals products and developed packaging into a major global business by acquiring fourteen packaging companies, among them American Sealtest (1998) and Dutch Van Leer (1999). By that time Van Leer owned the best-known, high-end U.S. paper tableware brand, Chinet. Chinet is a direct descendant of the first paper plates ever made by Martin Keyes and the Keyes Fibre Company, which became part of Van Leer.

Dart

Dart Container Corporation, of Mason, Michigan, is a privately held corporation and the world's largest producer of foam packaging products. Based on data from Hoover's, the financial publisher, Dart had revenues of $1.4 billion in 2005. Dart began as Dart Manufacturing making metal products. Soon after the appearance of polystyrene foam, the company began producing foam cups. Success in the product led it in the direction of packaging. Dart is predominantly a producer of disposable plastic cups and packaging products.

Georgia-Pacific Corporation (G-P)

G-P began in 1927 as a hardwood lumber wholesaler in Atlanta, Georgia, going public in 1949. The company operated as a public pulp and paper company until its acquisition by Koch Industries, Inc. Koch took G-P private in 2005. For 2004, its last full year as a publicly traded company, Georgia-Pacific reported sales revenues of $5.6 billion. The company is best known as a leading producer of paperboard and paperboard containers, including bleached boxboard used in frozen food packaging. These products accounted for $5.5 billion of its 2004 sales. A small part of the company's activity, around $700 million per year, is its Dixie Food Service activity. G-P is thus the current incarnation of the original Dixie cup first manufactured by Hugh Moore in Boston. Dixie cups are the top ranked brand of cups, followed by Solo and Jack Frost (both made by Solo), and Dart (made by Dart). G-P's products in the disposable tableware category are divided roughly equally between consumer sales (54%) and foodservice sales (46%).

International Paper Company

IP is a diversified producer in the pulp and paper industry. Its sales revenues in 2006, $21.99 billion, were earned in selling: printing papers (31.5% of total); industrial packaging (22.4%); consumer packaging (11.2%); distribution services (30.8%); forest products (3.5%); and specialty products (4.3%). Packaging products represented around a third of IP's activity. A relatively small portion of that businesses, its Food Services segment, had sales of $396 million in 2006 and involved principally disposable paper-based products.

WinCup, Inc.

WinCup is the second largest producer of foam cups in the United States. The company became part of Radnor Holdings Corporation in 1991, a company that reported sales in 2005 of $464 million. Radnor also acquired Polar Plastics Inc. (2003), another participant in disposable plastics tableware. Radnor Chemical Corporation was the country's fifth largest producer of expandable polystyrene, thus initially linking Radnor and WinCup. In 2006 Radnor filed for bankruptcy. WinCup was taken private by Tennenbaum Capital Partners LLC in 2006. WinCup, Handi-Kup, and StyroChem are well-known brands of the company.

MATERIALS & SUPPLY CHAIN LOGISTICS

Paper products are ultimately derived from trees, specifically from the cellulose fiber in the wood. Approximately 40 percent of the wood's content by weight reaches the final product after pulping. Pulping is a process that requires the use of chemicals such as sodium hydroxide or sulfate, sodium chlorate, chlorine, and sulfuric acid. Substantial amounts of water and of energy are consumed in making the pulp from which disposable products are made. Pulping operations in the United States take place near pulpwood harvesting in three regions, principally in the Southeast, the Northwest, and the Upper Midwest. Pulp products in raw or finished form (e.g., sanitary board) are shipped to converters located near population centers.

Plastics are derived from petroleum which travels very substantial distances from major oil producing regions of the world by ship to refineries typically located in the vicinity of ports or along water corridors. Plastics reach converters as resins and are then transformed by heat processes into final products. Refining of oil into fractions, including the major plastics, is also energy consumptive, but most of the energy used is derived from the crude oil itself.

The production of both paper and plastic are heavily impacted by the cost of energy, the cost of crude oil. Pulping is an energy intensive process and plastics are themselves produced with petroleum products. The production of both paper and plastics have, consequently, seen price pressures during the first decade of the twenty-first century as petroleum prices have risen throughout the decade reaching double-digit rates of increase in the middle of the decade.

From an environmental point of view paper products are undesirable upstream, thus in production, because they produce large amounts of wastewater loaded with contaminants which must be removed and disposed of. Very little water is used in extracting plastic resins from crude oil—most of the water being used for process cooling. Plastics, however, do not naturally degrade in landfills. Thus they are undesirable downstream, after discard. For these reasons a logistical aspect of the manufacture of these products is recycling of what is known as postconsumer waste. Whether the material recycled is paper or plastic, products made from recovered materials after consumption are never made into tableware again but find uses in non-food applications. Plastics are the least recycled of all packaging materials. Polystyrene foam is the most efficient material for disposable products because, in its expanded form, polystyrene cups, plates, and bowls are light and have very little product content. It is, however, not biodegradable and thus poses its own disposal problems.

DISTRIBUTION CHANNEL

Consumer products come in branded and in private label versions. When producers make private label tableware for a large buyer such as the Kroger grocery chain, products are shipped directly to the buyer's distribution centers. Large chains as well as smaller retailers purchase their branded products from wholesalers.

A similar division in distribution is also present in the foodservice sector. Large fast food companies purchase paper and plastic dishes, containers, straws, and cutlery directly from producers in large quantities, with the flow of products being largely continuous. Another large market is represented by foodservice organizations, commercial and institutional, that purchase their supplies on an as-needed basis from wholesalers, typically in case-lots, and periodically reordering when their inventories get low.

KEY USERS

The ultimate users of paper and plastic dishes are people buying supplies for special events, such as parties, or for casual uses at home—or the same people when they are buying food delivered to them in such containers. In the first instance the user is buying the product itself to serve others—family and friends. In the second, the user is, perhaps buying a soda or hamburger. The container is simply the object in which the food is delivered.

ADJACENT MARKETS

Paper and plastic dishes are light, inexpensive, and disposable alternatives to permanent tableware and cutlery. The permanent products are the most closely adjacent markets to the throwaway segment. It is not unusual to find plastic cutlery in the permanent cutlery drawer and disposable products waiting for use on the same shelves where china and glassware are stored. The permanent counterparts to our product cluster represented a smaller total market in 2005, $6.2 billion versus $8.5 billion for disposables. This included metal cutlery (9%), glass dishes, stemware, and drinking glasses (24%), china and porcelain dishes (17%), and plastic tableware (50%). In this product grouping, plastics also dominate. The total estimate includes imported products that are important especially in the vitreous category.

Around 65 percent to 70 percent of all plastic and paper dishes are associated with the foodservice industry in which they serve the dual purpose of packaging the product and serving it to users at the same time. This suggests that a substantial part of our product cluster is part of the much larger packaging industry.

In the foodservice industry itself, products offered by wholesalers to caterers and institutional buyers of paper and plastic tableware include a variety of other products including disposable tablecloths and table covers; napkins and doilies; aprons, bibs, and chefs hats; gloves, hairnets, and caps; disposable placemats; paper toweling; and baskets or basket trays intended to support paper or plastic trays.

RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Companies in this industry all spend a good deal of money on improving products and developing new lines. In the paper segments, companies are responding to pressures by their large foodservice clients who want to buy product containing high percentages of postconsumer waste. Manufacturers routinely captured pulping and conversion wastes and industrial wastes for reuse. Such residues are clean, uniform, and concentrated, and are therefore cost effective to collect. Environmental activists, however, value postconsumer waste recycling in order to reduce waste-disposal on land. Raising the postconsumer recycled content especially of food grade products is difficult because it requires expensive collection of waste separated by material type and more intensive processing of mixed grades of paper. Approaches used include using secondary fibers as structural support for products in which food comes in contact with virgin resins used as coatings rather than with the fiber.

In the plastics segment of the industry work is advancing to modify products so that they will degrade more readily after disposal by combining them with other chemicals. The industry also actively supports all efforts to lift recycling rates—typically achieved by separate collection of plastics by resins so that they can be readily processed into lower (non-food) grades of product.

CURRENT TRENDS

Two discernible trends in this category include declining use of paper in favor of plastics and the relatively slower growth of cups compared to the growth of plates, dishes, and other containers. Within the plate-dish category, foam plastics are showing very strong growth. The explosive growth of bottled water consumption may be in part responsible for relatively slow growth in the disposable cup category.

The bottled water industry grew at a rate of 14 percent per year in the 1997–2005 period, compared to 2.4 percent growth in disposable cups and 2.8 percent growth in soft drinks (mostly packaged in aluminum cans and plastic bottles). The population consuming water directly from plastic bottles is clearly on the rise. The strong growth of foam-plastic plates and dishes (nearly 17% per year) is in part explained by changing lifestyles favoring fast foods and ready-to-eat meals, in part by gradually improving characteristics of foam containers.

TARGET MARKETS & SEGMENTATION

Target markets for disposable paper and plastic dishes are, broadly speaking: (1) consumers buying such supplies for parties, (2) the commercial foodservice market, and (3) a rather diverse institutional market in which foodservice dominates but other sectors represent buyers purchasing the industry's product for uses peripheral to packaging or serving food. The medical field is a small but important consumer of tiny cups used for dispensing medica-tions—and also a large customer for hospital foodservice implements. Small paper cups are also purchased in many other research, hobby, and recreational contexts that do not involve food.

Marketing approaches in this field always combine several distinct messages at once. For example, producers will emphasize the safety and health benefits of using disposables made of pure, virgin materials, the quality and sturdiness of the product, labor savings to be achieved, and the cost benefit. Products are available ranging from low cost utilitarian implementations on up to the highly decorative wares. High-end products are promoted based on their attractiveness, colors, and aesthetic appeal to the consumer. Producers tell institutional buyers how the products can be imprinted with the buyer's logo and message. The industry also engages in defensive promotion. Thus producers of plastics attempt, in their sales messages, to counter the public's perception that cups and containers litter the environment and do not degrade in landfills by emphasizing the high environmental costs of making competing paper products. They also point out that foam products have a much smaller carbon footprint than do their paper competitors, in effect, the foam products are mostly air.

RELATED ASSOCIATIONS & ORGANIZATIONS

American Chemistry Council, http://americanchemistry.com

American Forest & Paper Association, http://www.afandpa.org

Reusable Industrial Packaging Association, http://www.reusablepackaging.org

The Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI), http://www.plasticsindustry.org

Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry (TAPPI), http://www.tappi.org

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see also Frozen Foods, Snack Foods