Boston Public Radio Podcast

If you're a consumer at Chipotle or Sweetgreen, you might feel virtuous that the bowls used there are considered compostable. Yet new findings show that these compostable bowls can still cause harm to both the environment and human health. Food writer Corby Kummer joined Boston Public Radio on Tuesday to talk about what this new research means for the future of your food bowl. "A writer from The New Food Economy got 19 different samples of compostable bowls, from Chipotle to Sweetgreen. All of them had high content of fluorines, which is what these 'forever chemicals' contain," he said. Compostable bowls began to find increasing popularity when some cities like New York banned Styrofoam containers, Kummer said. "New York and others started banning single-use foam because it was so bad for the environment and it never biodegraded." These foam containers contained long chain PFAs, and switching to compostable materials seemed reasonable, Kummer said. Yet these compostable containers consist of the less re