Waste not, want not
Brand agency Pilot PMR built a way to transport reusable dishes
After a group office lunch of takeout, Sarah Lazarovic and her co-workers at brand agency Pilot PMR always felt queasy about the trash that spilled out from the bin.
“It’s a nice festive thing to do to all eat together, but at the same time you just feel gross because you’ve wasted so much,” said Lazarovic, the agency’s creative director and the author of A Bunch of Pretty
Things I Did Not Buy, her 2014 memoir about not shopping.
“We all care about sustainability and we’re pretty good about bringing our lunches and biking to work,” Lazarovic said.
But one sushi lunch for 20 people and “suddenly . . . our garbage can is overflowing with Styrofoam.”
So, she and her colleagues came up with a solution: a waste-free cargo bike they can use to pedal reusable dishes to restaurants whenever they order a group lunch.
At the Toronto Tool Library’s Danforth location, which offers the free use of equipment, a workshop space and help from knowledgeable staff, Lazarovic and her colleagues turned a used cargo bike into a rolling, person-powered picnic basket — complete with dishware for 12, a fold-out table and bin for compostable scraps.
“The idea was, could we arrive at an affordable, simple solution, a prototype, on our own that would show people it’s easy to do this,” David Doze, Pilot PMR founder and CEO, told the Star at the tool library in August.
He and his colleagues managed to mostly revamp the bike in a single day, adding the finishing touches over the next month. “Our hope is the bike will live with us . . . and the community will use it and they will not only get some social benefit from it, but that they’ll also use the reusable items in it as opposed to creating garbage.”
Now complete, a staff member has used the bike to travel to two east-side restaurants, St. Lawrence-area restaurant Farmr and Cherry St. Bar-B-Que in the Port Lands, dropping off containers earlier in the day and returning to pick them up at lunch time full of food.
And the Pilot team is ready to share the bike with anyone who is interested, in an effort to promote camaraderie and sharing in the area, Lazarovic said. Anyone can sign out the bike for free by emailing her. They’ll be asked to leave a copy of their licence and, of course, return the bike with the dishware clean and ready for the next group.
Besides the perks to the environment, Lazarovic said the bike also lets them take their group takeout orders on the road and away from the office.
“Our office is a five-minute ride from Sugar Beach, so now we can just walk over there, bike over there with all our stuff and have our monthly lunch there,” Lazarovic said.