Your foam coffee cup is fighting for its life

Above: Dart’s first consumer cup sits in a museum of the company’s history in Mason, Mich. Below: CEO Jim Lammers says he believes the company and its foam products have been unfairly singled out. Above: Dart’s first consumer cup sits in a museum of the company’s history in Mason, Mich. Below: CEO Jim Lammers says he believes the company and its foam products have been unfairly singled out. Photo: Photos By Lyndon French / New York Times 2019 Photo: Photos By Lyndon French / New York Times 2019 Image 1 of / 9 Caption Close Your foam coffee cup is fighting for its life 1 / 9 Back to Gallery

MASON, Mich. — The Dart Container Corp., by some measures, is an American success story.

The family-owned business was co-founded in Michigan by a World War II veteran with a triple major in mathematics, engineering and metallurgy, and it developed products that, in no small way, helped fuel the modern economy. Dart makes, by the millions, white foam cups, clamshells, coffee cup lids, and disposable forks and knives — the single-use containers that enable Americans to eat and drink on the go. It employs about 15,000 people across 14 states.

But now many of the products that this low-profile Midwestern company creates are being labeled by critics as environmental blights contributing to the world’s plastic pollution problem.

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Cities and states are increasingly banning one of Dart’s signature products, foam food and beverage containers, which can harm fish and other marine life. Berkeley led the way in 1988, when it banned the use of single-use food containers made of “expanded polystyrene” foam, more commonly, but inaccurately, known as Styrofoam. (Styrofoam is a trademarked material typically used as insulation.) San Francisco passed a more sweeping ban on polystyrene foam containers in 2016.

In December, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York proposed a statewide ban on polystyrene food containers. Maine and Maryland banned polystyrene foam containers last year, and nearly 60 nations have enacted or are in the process of passing similar prohibitions. Some elected officials and environmental groups say polystyrene containers are difficult to recycle in any meaningful way.

“There is overwhelming evidence that this material is seriously damaging the Earth,” said Brooke Lierman, a Maryland lawmaker who sponsored her state’s ban.

But Dart Container, which has been owned by the Dart family since its founding in the 1950s, is not backing down. While many plastics companies work to protect their product through trade groups and feel-good marketing campaigns, Dart is challenging regulation directly and aggressively.

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. 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. The city is now performing that analysis.

“We don’t believe there are good, objective reasons to single out certain materials,” Dart CEO Jim Lammers said in a recent interview at the company’s headquarters.

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.”

Dart is waging a broader campaign to argue that its products are being used as scapegoats for a society fueled by on-the-go consumerism. 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. 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.

“If you just give up on foam,” said Michael Westerfield, director of recycling at Dart, “what are they going to want to do next?”

The backlash against foam is taking its toll. 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’. It is also experimenting with containers that can be composted or fashioned from recycled content.

Today, foam makes up only a fifth of all the products that Dart sells. The company says overall sales of food and beverage containers, which generate $3 billion in annual revenue, are essentially flat.

Even 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. 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.

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. But the harm that plastic pollution can inflict on marine life is immediate, environmentalists say.

“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.

The same properties that can make foam an environmental problem also make it profitable to manufacture. The costs are low because foam is 95% air and can be made using relatively little raw plastic.

William Dart did not invent foam cups, but he did master their mass production.

After returning from World War II and graduating from the University of Michigan, William Dart spent a year working for DuPont chemical company. 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. William Dart began experimenting with creating cups from polystyrene, a material with seemingly magical insulating properties that would serve the growing fast-food industry.

Chick-fil-A was one of Dart’s first major accounts. The company also sold its plastic to hospitals and schools, sports stadiums, and food service giants Sysco and US Foods.

The company celebrates its long history of manufacturing in the United States. While many U.S. factories moved to Asia in search of cheaper workers, foam cannot be imported profitably from overseas; the cost of importing the lightweight containers would offset any savings in labor, Dart says.

Lammers said the company was growing frustrated with the intensifying blowback against foam.

“Food and beverage packaging, like a lot of things in life, is not a sound-bite discussion,” said Lammers, who joined the company in 1986.

The one area that was off-limits was Building No. 1, where the white foam cups are made. The company says the foam machinery, designed by William Dart in the 1950s and refined over decades, is such a closely guarded secret that only select employees and customers are allowed on the factory floor.

William Dart’s heirs are also intensely private.

His sons Robert and Kenneth Dart have been involved in running the company, to varying degrees, since the 1980s.

In 2012, Dart acquired another Midwestern container company, Solo, for $1 billion. The deal greatly expanded Dart’s product line into more paper and rigid plastic containers like the Solo cups that are ubiquitous at college keg parties and football tailgates.

Yet even as it diversified, Dart never gave up on polystyrene foam.

For years, the company has emphasized how polystyrene foam can be recycled, just like some other forms of plastic containers. The problem is that most municipal recycling systems do not accept foam because it can be difficult to find buyers willing to pay enough money for the used material. So Dart offers to collect and transport the used foam containers for cities at no cost.

The company says it’s possible that used polystyrene could eventually be made into new drinking cups en masse, but right now there is limited collection and processing capacity.

“We’d love to get there,” said Westerfield, the recycling director.

And some communities doubt they ever will. Growing up in Baltimore, Claire Wayner and her family used to haul their egg cartons and foam packaging to a drop-off site that Dart supported in the city. Volunteers in the local schools used to wipe down macaroni and cheese remnants and cheeseburger juices from hundreds of foam lunch trays and drive them to the recycling site.

Despite all of these good intentions, Wayner wondered how much of the city’s polystyrene was actually being recycled and questioned how large the market was for used foam beyond niche products like picture frames.

“It seems so random and ridiculous,” said Wayner, who is now a sophomore at Princeton University.

In high school, Wayner and other students started Baltimore Beyond Plastic, a group that persuaded school officials to remove the foam lunch trays from the city’s public schools.

The student group, working with other environmental activists, then pushed successfully for a citywide ban on foam food containers. After the vote, Dart closed the recycling drop-off location it supported in Baltimore.

Asked about the closing, Dart spokeswoman Becky Warren said in a statement, “We invest our recycling resources in communities that support our customers and our company.”

To Wayner and others, the move showed that Dart considered polystyrene recycling not a viable enterprise but rather a bargaining chip to ward off regulation.

“As soon as they lost, it was like they took their marbles and went home,” said Martha Ainsworth, a volunteer leader with the Sierra Club in Maryland.

Michael Corkery is a New York Times writer.