Just as compostable serviceware has permeated eateries on campus, students who frequent Palo Alto restaurants will also be seeing biodegradable alternatives where polystyrene food containers were once commonplace.

Last Thursday — also Earth Day — a citywide ban on polystyrene food containers, most often seen in their brand form, Styrofoam, took effect in Palo Alto, pushing restaurants, grocery stores and other businesses to provide compostable serviceware for one-time use needs as part of a larger ongoing city effort to reduce waste and provide sustainable alternatives for everyday needs.

“The larger goal is to restrict plastics ending up in the bay and the open ocean,” explained Phil Bobel, Palo Alto’s environmental compliance manager. “There, they break into small pieces and don’t decompose, and animals may eat the plastics, resulting in death by starvation and malnutrition.”

The ordinance was adopted by the City Council almost a year ago, in May, but the city decided to wait a year to give restaurants the chance to run out their supplies of polystyrene containers before enacting the ban. Most restaurants, though, said they only needed three to four months to use up their stock, Bobel explained.

Palo Alto’s effort has been greeted enthusiastically by students involved in sustainablity on campus.

Milena Gonzalez ’12, fundraising director of Engineers for a Sustainable World, called the ban a “strong move toward a more sustainable city environment.”

The ban comes “late in the sense that we have known for years that polystyrene is a material that does not biodegrade, since it’s a plastic, and a material that causes great challenges to recycle,” Gonzalez wrote in an e-mail to The Daily. But, she said, perhaps more cities would take up the same move.

“On the whole, I’m in support of the ban,” wrote Students for a Sustainable Stanford Outreach Officer Leah Kuritzky ’10 in an e-mail to The Daily. “Styrofoam makes up a relatively small portion of the waste stream, particularly by mass because it’s so lightweight, but I’m glad that the city is taking steps to remove it completely.”

Stanford’s campus eateries, including Tresidder Union, Olive’s and Axe & Palm have already made the transition to completely compostable serviceware with accompanying compost bins, an ongoing effort for campus sustainability groups.

The same challenges that faced Stanford in implementing compostable serviceware may also affect Palo Alto eateries in the future.

“I think the greatest challenge that Stanford faces is educating the campus population about the ecological and economical benefits of recycling and on how to dispose of things correctly,” Gonzalez said. She also noted that Stanford’s many campus visitors are also a challenge because they are not used to the system, and said that this might also be a problem for Palo Alto, which receives a significant number of tourists and visitors.

“Since the logistical shift, the biggest challenges have been consumer education and engineering of locations and signage of the bins to help make the transition easy and clear,” Kuriztsky said. “The ban on Styrofoam will probably be an easier transition than a shift to compostables, because it requires only compliance by the vendors, and does not rely on consumers.”

Bobel, however, felt that the city is ready to phase out polystyrene without too much trouble, pointing out that the next steps lie in bigger goals for sustainability.

“We’re kind of done with Styrofoam food containers,” he said. The next step, he said, is arranging for home pickup of food waste — a service currently not provided by the city.

“Right now, if you take a compostable container home, there’s not much you can do but throw it out,” he said. If residents have a regular pickup service for food waste, they would be able to compost food waste from home as well as compostable containers brought home from businesses.

“It’s not going to come soon, though,” Bobel said. “It would really drive up garbage costs.”

Bobel said enforcement of the ban will be worked into current restaurant inspection workforces.

“We don’t think [enforcing polystyrene ban] will take new city funds,” Bobel said. “We already have people doing inspections for compliance with other measures.”

Although restaurants will be inspected regularly, smaller food services such as motels, business cafeterias, mobile food vendors and city fairs might not be. Instead, enforcement for the rest of businesses will work on a customer complaint basis.

“We’ve really been trying to publicize the change, and it seems like residents are really interested,” Bobel said, expressing confidence that if customers know of the new ban, they will report businesses that do not follow the guidelines.