ers account for almost 150 million tons of single-use plastics an-
nually. This equals about 25 Great Pyramids of Giza—and less than
14% of it is recycled each year. The rest is landfilled, burned into the
atmosphere, or left in the environment, where, after remarkably
brief service, it will spend the next 10 to 1,000 years polluting for-
ests, turning the ocean into a polymer soup, and eventually enter-
ing our food chain, where the compounds break down, releasing
substances believed to cause cancer, endocrine system disruption,
“pre-polluted” childbirths, and other problems. Sustainable alter-
natives, meanwhile, have yet to reach meaningful scale.
But the sausage tray we are looking at is nontoxic, compostable,
and already on shelves in more than 4,000 U.S. stores. It’s made with
biodegradable molded fiber, which is engineered to outperform plas-
tic. (Unfortunately, the trays often wind up wrapped in plastic; no-
body has yet devised an affordable alternative to polymer cling wrap.)
Footprint uses materials such as virgin newsprint and double- lined
kraft (basically, clean postindustrial cardboard scraps) with patented
food-safe chemistry to produce the tray, as well as shelf-stable cups
and oilproof microwavable bowls that can stay frozen for 180 days.
Footprint currently sells eight versions of the tray, in four colors, to
traditional meat brands. (During the company’s 2018 sustainability
summit, a Tyson rep tracked down a Footprint executive during an
intermission and said, “I buy more plastic than anybody in here, and
I’m realizing more than half of it doesn’t have to be plastic.”) In 2017,
Footprint helped ConAgra move its Healthy Choice frozen line from
- Colombier
Paper Cup
Most paper cups
include a thin
plastic coating that
makes them difficult
to recycle. The
Colombier cup uses
a water-based,
nonplastic coating
that is compostable
while remaining
resistant to heat, oil,
and grease, making
it easily recyclable.
MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES 2020MARCH/APRIL 2020plastic CPET containers to decomposable bowls. Leading
producers of mushrooms and corn have embraced Foot-
print’s fiber trays. One of the world’s largest processors of
cut vegetables plans to move its bagged lettuce greens
to Footprint’s fiber boxes in early 2020. After a study last
August revealed that the compostable bowls favored by
health-conscious chains like Sweetgreen, Chipotle, Dig,
Fresh&Co, and Dos Toros were in fact full of PFAS, a class
of “forever chemicals” linked to cancer, several of the
chains called Footprint in a panic. Sweetgreen has al-
ready debuted its new packaging in select stores. Pegged
to Super Bowl LIV in February, Footprint (the event’s
“foodware sustainability partner”) debuted a decompos-
able eco-cooler that holds 24 beer cans, keeps a bag of ice
frozen for 24 hours, and has an iPhone holder built into
the lid, which doubles as a speaker.
Currently, Footprint is devising alternative packag-
ing for Philips, Bose, Target, Foxconn, and more. Its
edge, says Easler, is that its executives “think like Intel
engineers.”Actually, for more than a decade, beginning
in the mid-1990s, Swope and Chung were
Intel engineers. They met on the Chandler,
Arizona, campus in 1995, when the Pentium
processor was brand-new and Intel had just shattered
the billion-dollar-profit ceiling to become the world’s
largest chipmaker. Intel CEO Andy Grove’s rank-and-yank
system was firmly in place, weeding out the bottom tenth
of the workforce annually. Some employees called in
sick rather than give presentations. The California-born
Swope and the New York native Chung respected each
other’s ability to thrive at the company and over time
became inseparable, owning matching Land Rovers,
lifting weights together at EOS Fitness during lunch,
and becoming next-door neighbors not once, but twice.
They believed that the way Intel was packaging its
semiconductors wasn’t optimal. One of the world’s most
advanced tech companies was shipping half-million-
dollar bundles of microchips in plastic containers that
leached—or “outgassed”—volatile organic compounds.
Swope got permission to form a department with the sole
task of innovating packaging. His team used advanced
polymers developed for aerospace to protect wafers (the
flat sheet of silicon upon which a microchip is built) from
moisture, oxygen, and other contaminants, ultimately
saving Intel $350 million over a four-year period.
This led to a worrisome realization. If a company like
Intel, which was operating under Grove’s strict “only the
paranoid survive” philosophy, had been tolerating the
use of plastic that leached harmful chemicals, what was
happening elsewhere? Footprint development VP Cary
Newton, who interned at Intel, (Continued on page 102)