I don’t eat much fast food, but I make an exception for Taco Bell. They apparently have a corporate policy that the person taking your take-out order must ask how much sauce you would like. They often hand out much much more than you request. This leads me to wonder what the retail value of one of those little packets of sauce. I assume that the profit per meal is not high (e.g., we usually get the cheap items, such as the 89 cent bean burritos). I wondered whether Taco Bell still made any profit on our order. With $2 Billion in annual sales, that might be a LOT of wasted sauce. In the aggregate, it adds up.

Today, with several children in the car, we went through a Taco Bell drive-through. The woman asked us “How many packs of sauce would you like?” I responded, “Five packs of mild sauce, please.”

Here’s most of the packs of Taco Bell sauce she gave us (we discovered this after we got home and started eating). She actually gave us three more packs of sauce than you’ll see in this photo, but we used up those three prior to taking this photo.

I assume this is not an anomaly. Same thing goes for napkins. Sometimes, we find 30 napkins in the take out bag that contains only 5 or 6 food items. It just seems so wasteful, to go along with all of the heavily inked cardboard packaging for much of the food. I’m not trying to single out Taco Bell here–this wasteful packaging occurs at most fast food establishments, as well as most restaurants (even higher priced restaurants) that offer take out food.

Some states, such as California, are trying to do something about fast food waste:

Furthermore, fast food restaurants are a drag on local communities’ waste diversion rates. Currently less than 35% of fast food store’s waste is diverted from landfills, the vast majority of which is cardboard. Very little food packaging and almost no fast food plastic is currently diverted from landfills. This low diversion rate is surprising considering the vast majority of restaurant waste is not plastic–its main litter culprit–but rather paper, a perfectly recyclable resource.