SALEM — If you’ve ever brought your own container to take leftovers home from a restaurant, you may have been committing an infraction.

The Oregon Legislature is looking to change that.

Senate Bill 545, which would allow restaurants to fill consumer-owner containers with food, recently passed with bipartisan support in the Senate and is now in the Democratically-controlled house.

Addison Schulberg, manager at Great Pacific Wine & Coffee Co. in Pendleton, was ecstatic about the pending legislation.

Like any restaurant owner, he knows firsthand the high cost of packaging food.

“Our cardboard boxes that we give away cost us 45 cents to $1 (each). During the pandemic, we added an additional charge to takeout orders due to the cost of packaging materials. With the supply chain shortages, the price quadrupled on some materials,” Schulberg explained. “It’s one of the biggest battles that goes on every day in my mind is how to reduce the cost of packaging.”

Every customer that brought their own container for to-go orders or leftovers would chip away at that cost.

If enacted, the bill as law will go into effect no later than June 2024. But the new allowances would be voluntary and at a given establishment’s discretion to accommodate.

Despite the savings on each to-go order, Scott McConnell, owner of Side A Brewing in La Grande had his concerns.

“It gets really busy, especially on Fridays and Saturdays,” he said. “It would be logistically really difficult to accommodate. Some of the difficulty for us, I think, would be tagging a particular dish with the right ticket and then portioning — will the whole order fit in the container the customer gave us?”

He said the concept might work better for those selling a la carte or on a smaller scale, such as coffee shops that sell light fare.

Cutting down on plastic

SB 545 is the latest in a series of bills seeking to reduce single-use plastic statewide.

“I find it strange that if I’m sitting at a table and can’t eat all my spaghetti, that I can’t just scoop it into my own glass container and head home. Currently they don’t have to allow it,” explained Sen. Janeen Sollman, D-Hillsboro, the chief sponsor who introduced and carried the bill.

She said other customer-owned containers, such as those used for drinks, already are provided for, and the Oregon Department of Agriculture now allows consumers to bring reusable food containers to grocery stores to use for purchases from bulk bins, for example. SB 545 comprehensively includes rules providing for these and reusable produce bags as well.

SB 545 also would enable customers to provide their own container for food when ordering for takeout, and consumers could opt out of other single-use plastics such as straws and utensils.

Sollman cited findings from the 2021 Upstream “Reuse Wins” report in support of the bill.

According to Upstream, 79% of disposable food ware and packaging U.S. restaurants and food service businesses use is for takeout and delivery. This adds up to restaurants and food-service businesses spending $24 billion each year on disposables.

Businesses and city governments spend $6 billion a year on solid waste management costs attributable to disposable food packaging.

This amounts to some 20 billion pieces of litter from disposable food-service packaging. Most of it doesn’t fit into recycling waste streams, so it piles up in landfills or not making it there in the first place, causing pollution.

Procedures outlined in SB 545 do specify that a consumer-provided container would need to be industrially sanitized prior to receiving ready-to-eat food.

Taking on the safety issue

Robert Brady, owner of Burger Bob’s Drive-In in Baker City, which has been owned by his family since 1960, said his biggest concern was contamination.

“Where have those containers been and how clean are they really? If I have to put it on my counters and anywhere else, there’s the possibility of contamination,” he said. “A customer comes back and says ‘I’m sick,’ well, maybe it was my food, or maybe it was their container. I can’t prove it anymore.”

Schulberg said while there are ways to safely accommodate it, it would be time-consuming.

“For restaurants that do want to do that, it’s giving them the freedom to and allowing for that decision to be made by restaurant owners. I think that’s great,” McConnell said.

Though Brady and McConnell expressed reluctance to participate in the new allowances should they pass into law, Schulberg has set his sights on a bigger goal that SB 545 specifically provides a framework for.

“It’s a system where the consumer can buy into a circular container reuse program,” he said. “You would come in and pay once to be a part of our system, then your to-go order or leftovers would be placed into a reusable glass container, which we would stock and sanitize. You eat your order, put the containers in your car and bring them back to our restaurant and we provide your order in a fresh set of glassware that’s been cleaned and sanitized like the rest of our dishes. And it goes on.”

The upfront costs are high, he said, but long-term, it makes a lot of sense, citing a large local customer base that he foresees being onboard with the concept.

Senate Bill 545 in the 2023 Oregon Legislature would allow restaurants to fill consumer-owner containers with food. You can read the text of the bill at tinyurl.com/yc2k227h.