The next time you buy a sandwich on the Morningside campus, take a close look at its attractive cardboard container. Yes, Columbia's efforts to become increasingly environmentally friendly have reached even the packaging of carryout food.

Since last fall, plastic sandwich containers have been a thing of the past. The new sandwich wedges, as they are known to the food service industry, are biodegradable and compostable. They manufactured with 10 percent unbleached recycled cardboard, the maximum allowed by FDA regulations. Victoria Dunn, Associate Director Dining Operations, says she got the idea for the containers from a field visit with her staff to Pret A Manger, the British sandwich chain with several outlets in Manhattan. The company pioneered the use of the containers in the 1990s.

Containers for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are the only exception to the use of the recycled wedges, Dunn says. They're packaged in transparent PLA containers, also biodegradable. "The reason we did this is because of all the students with nut allergies on campus" so they can see the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches more clearly than in the wedges, she says.

Columbia buys the containers from Borax Paper Products, a Brooklyn vendor. Perhaps most interesting is that they're manufactured by COLPAC, a British company, and imported by Borax. Jeffrey Konowitz, Vice President of Business Development at Borax, says that right now no one in the United States is making the eco-friendly cardboard sandwich containers, hence the need to import them.

The price difference between the plastic and cardboard containers is a matter of just a few pennies, Dunn and Konowitz say. Konowitz also points out the environmental advantage of shipping the biodegradable containers from England against the disadvantages of dumping plastic containers in landfills, and the amount of energy consumed in producing a plastic product produced in St. Louis and shipped to New York.

"According to the International Chamber of Shipping," Konowitz says, "an average cargo ship will produce 15 grams per ton of carbon dioxide emissions, whereas a trailer truck produces 50 grams per ton.

"The bottom line is a plastic wedge in a landfill forever - or a paper wedge breaking down into the earth in a limited amount of time."

Cornell University has joined Columbia in using the cardboard containers on its campus in Ithaca, NY.