Medium: Newspaper

Vehicle: New York Times

Reporter: Michael Corkery

Date: February 11, 2020

Headline: Your Foam Coffee Cup Is Fighting for Its Life

Section: Environment (p. B8)

Company Involved: Dart Container Corporation

Story

Dart Container Corporation manufactures a variety of single-use food and beverage products for on-the-go use. They include foam cups, foam clamshell food containers, coffee cup lids, and disposable forks and knives. Although they’re convenient, these products are harming the environment by ending up in our oceans and threatening sea life. One of the biggest threats is expanded polystyrene (the generic version styrofoam) because “it can break down easily into small pieces, harming fish and animals that ingest it” and that does not exclude humans! Plastic fibers are found in everything from drinking water to table salt, but the long-term health effects are still being studied. Maryland and Maine have already banned the substance and in December, Gov. Cuomo of New York proposed they ban it as well. Approximately 60 other nations are in the process of banning polystyrene completely because of the overwhelming evidence that the material is damaging the earth.

For years, Dart has been trying to emphasize how polystyrene can be recycled, which is true. However, most recycling centers won’t accept the material because of the lack of demand for used polystyrene. Dart tried to solve this problem by collecting and transporting the recycled materials for free, but when students pushed the city of Baltimore, Maryland to ban foam products entirely, Dart closed their collection center and shut down 2 warehouses in the state, taking the jobs of 90 workers and proving they only set it up to prevent regulation, not to solve the problem they created by manufacturing the products in the first place. The company promises to be different in 10 years and has started developing plant-based products, but I fear the low cost of producing polystyrene will be too compelling of an argument for them to move on from the material entirely.

 

My Thoughts

This article was definitely negative public relations towards Dart Container Corporation. This is evident through the language used – “While many plastics companies work to protect their product through trade groups and feel-good marketing campaigns, Dart is challenging regulation directly and aggressively.” The use of the word aggressive makes their response to the changing legislation seem unjust. If they were strongly challenging legislation for something good, the reporter might have used words such as “passionately,” but the negative connotation of the word “aggressively” is enough to put a negative spin on the whole article.

If I were the PR person for Dart, I would urge the CEO, Jim Lammers, to stop fighting for a material that is causing environmental issues and public uproar. The brand makes more than just polystyrene products, especially after acquiring the company Solo in 2012, so they don’t need to keep fighting for the one material that is going to cause controversy and hurt their brand. They haven’t given up on foam because it’s the cheapest to mass-produce, but I think in order to turn this around it would be smart to abandon polystyrene products entirely and focus more energy and resources on the future of materials, which is compostable and ocean-friendly.