In late December amid the pre-Christmas rush, the New York City Council unanimously passed legislation which bans restaurants, food carts and stores from selling or providing single-use cups, clamshells and trays as well as peanut shaped packing materials made from polystyrene. New York now joins almost 100 cities and towns across the US, including San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, which have passed similar bills banning polystyrene food and beverage containers, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC, New York, New York; www.nrdc.org), a non-profit international environmental advocacy organisation.

In addition, the council also passed a law requiring generators of large food waste, such as restaurants and grocery stores, to compost the material themselves. Both laws are scheduled to go into effect in 18 months.

Introduced by former mayor, Michael Bloomberg, in early 2013, many citizens called the piece of law he began promoting his farewell measure to the city after twelve years of service. Not everyone has been happy with the proposed ban since it was introduced in February and in the months leading up to the council's vote, there were heated demonstrations – both for and against – with children, mothers and teachers holding anti-styrofoam demonstrations with huge polystyrene puppets duking it out in the streets and parks across the city. Occasionally, they clashed with employees and owners of small restaurants, who feared their very livelihood was at stake should the legislation makes it through the voting hurdles.

According to local news media, an amendment has been added which gives the city a year to determine whether the substance can be recycled in an "environmentally effective, economically feasible and safe" way. If no approach is identified, the new legislation goes into effect as passed by the 51-member body in July 2015. Estimates place the amount of plastic foam tossed out in New York at up to 23,000 US tonnes annually.

Until the amendment was added, many restaurants, food establishments and foam maker Dart Container (Mason / Michigan; dartcontainer.com) and the American Chemistry Council (ACC, Washington, D.C., www.americanchemistry.com) were in a bitter battle with Bloomberg stating that the goal should not be to ban the product, but to focus on ways to recycle it instead.

A report funded by the ACC showed sales of foam containers in New York to be around USD 97.1m annually. In its opinion, the ban represented an "environmental tax", which would leave no other alternative to businesses and consumers to spend double the amounton replacements such as other types of plastics, coated paperboard and compostable materials.