Mailing Your Garbage

Sept. 9, 2021

Taco Bell's plan to have consumers send in used sauce packets.

Does anyone remember when condiment packets from fast food places were so rare and valuable that they were selling for more than $10 apiece on eBay?

Well, gosh, that was so five months ago. Now apparently they’re back to being nuisances – at least, the used ones from Taco Bell.

That chain has announced a partnership with recycler TerraCycle to encourage customers to turn in their used sauce packets to prevent them from being landfilled. According to Taco Bell’s estimate, some 8 billion sauce packets end up in landfills every year.

Taco Bell’s announcement didn’t specify what TerraCycle was going to do with the used packets. But TerraCycle likes to take discarded packaging – especially multi-polymer laminates and other flexible packaging that’s nearly impossible to recycle otherwise – and make it into bags, totes, pouches, lunchboxes and other accessories. (These products often preserve the original packaging as recognizable components, so you’re carrying a tote bag made of stitched-together Capri Sun pouches.)

What’s more interesting, at least to me, is how the used packets will be returned. Green-minded customers will have to 1) sign up for a TerraCycle account, 2) collect enough empty sauce packets to fill up a box, 3) print a label for free shipping from TerraCycle’s website, 4) attach it to the box and 5) take the box to a UPS center or drop box.

Dropping the used packets off at Taco Bell is apparently not an option. According to Taco Bell, a majority of customers in a test run preferred sending them in by UPS because most of Taco Bell’s sales now take place via drive-thru. In addition, using UPS helps these green-minded folk "minimize their transportation footprint and ship their box of saved sauce packets once full."

Hmmm. If someone is such a good Taco Bell customer that they have piles of used sauce packets, don’t they go there often enough so that turning in the used packets from the last trip would be no big deal? I have a sneaking suspicion that Taco Bell just doesn’t want to get stuck with smelly piles of shredded plastic in their stores.

This may seem like the polar opposite of the spike in prices for full ketchup packets, referenced at the top of this post. But in fact, they have a cause in common. That spike happened because a majority of restaurant meals were being eaten away from home, and restaurants were running out. A majority of restaurant meals are still being eaten away from home, which is why Taco Bell is handing out so many sauce packets.

So we’ve come full circle. Or actually, we never left the circle. It’s all because the pandemic refuses to go away – or to be more precise, because not enough Americans are getting vaccinated.

It's beginning to feel like one of Dante's circles of Hell.

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