Dishwashing: A love story

Reduce/Reuse/Recycle: Can you imagine a world without any throw away foodware? A visit to an industrial dishwashing facility helped show how it’s not that far away. 

In the United States alone, nearly 1 trillion (with a “t”) pieces of disposable foodware and packaging are used each year. The vast majority of it ends up buried in landfills, burned in incinerators, or littered in the environment. It sounds like too big a problem to solve. But if we start here in our own backyard, there are inspiring solutions at hand. 

Recently, at the invitation of the Environmental League of Massachusetts, I toured a new facility in Hyde Park, called ReDish.   It’s a pretty simple business/service: places that don’t have, or don’t want, dishwashing facilities default to single use foodware—”disposable” plates, cups, bowls, utensils, trays. The founders of ReDish want to turn that trend around. They “…noticed a budding interest in reuse, yet a glaring gap in the infrastructure needed to power enterprise-level solutions. So, we rolled up our sleeves and built what was missing: a robust, expert-driven warewashing service with the aim to make reuse an accessible and impactful part of daily routines.” 

Although ReDish is a relatively new company, the Boston area location is their third facility, following NYC and Philadelphia. They’ve been written up in major publications, received awards, and they appear to be on the path to “doing well by doing good.” The CEO, Caroline Vanderlip, who gave us the tour, suggested that the business was growing and doing well. 

They are keen on measuring their impact—their website includes a “yearly impact calculator.” One such measurement shows how a company of 500 people could divert more than 50,000 pounds of waste a year by switching to reusable foodware.

Seeing the big, industrial washing machines that do the dirty work, the stacks and trays of foodware that are then dried and organized for delivery, the trucks that then take those clean items to their destination, where the dirties are picked up and the loop starts again was inspiring. Watching reduce (single use foodware) and reuse (wash and use again) in action, and the kind of common sense thinking, infrastructure, and day to day living we need, make a huge problem seem like one that can be tackled. 

Stacked trays at ReDish facility.Photo by reDish | Used by permission