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Not since the ’80s has talk of fast-food waste been so popular. Then, it was yellow Styrofoam containers with golden arches.

By 1990, in large part due to a community campaign, McDonald’s announced it would toss its last Big Mac container made of polystyrene—the scientific term for Styrofoam.

Today, 14 U.S. cities from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon, have banned non-biodegradable take-out containers. In Toronto, a group called Naturopack has taken the lead of these cities and started a campaign for ethical takeaway. Urging the City of Toronto to provide business incentives for restaurants and coffee shops using biodegradable containers, Naturopack has also amassed a petition asking council to ban take-out Styrofoam entirely. In January, the group held a sold-out fundraiser at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel with performances by eco-minded bands and local comedians pulling out sets on the environment.

“It’s hard to find anyone who actually likes Styrofoam,” explained Naturopack director Kurt Firla. “You can look at it in the way of an orange. It has a package around it—the peel. If we can someday have packages that are either completely reusable or they vanish back into the earth, nourishing it when you’re done, then we’ve actually done something smart. We’ve used our brains and mimicked what nature does.”

At the event I met Jennifer Wright, who started Greenshift, an organization helping companies to “green” their workplaces. Wright has also spearheaded a new biodegradable packaging movement for Canadian restaurants. Wright worked with suppliers for what she refers to as “three years of talking to a wall” to initiate a source for biodegradable paper coffee cups. Now, on a table at the Naturopack event was a display of her efforts—a full line of bio restaurant containers, including coffee cups with a vegetable-based resin making them OK to throw into city green bins or properly turned landfills.

Wright told me she has helped nearly 200 cafés across the country convert to biodegradable cups. Most insightful was her coffee shop marketing plan. It would allow a coffee chain like Second Cup to switch to bio takeaway cups for as little as one cent per cup in a test market.

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