I demand my frozen vegetables are packaged in plastic bags. This is the standard packaging for good reason. There is no other material that combines the flexibility, lightness, and waterproofness of plastic. Plastic bags are not easily recyclable, but very little material is needed to make one. I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff to send a few grams of plastic to landfill (where the carbon stays out of the atmosphere), or burn it for energy recovery, to avoid spending far more fossil fuel on transport and wasted production.
Banning plastic packaging without thinking about the consequences will do more harm than good.
Paper boxes are perfectly suitable for frozen veg. They stack perfectly. Less flexible, I'll give you that. But a compostable box versus plastic seems like a win to me.
I suspect the reason manufacturers and grocers like plastic is that in a paper box, poor handling is dead obvious, because if the produce partially thaws in transit the box gets damp and is a telltale for poor temperature control.
Only if you coat the inside with plastic, thereby making the paper non-recyclable.
Instead of paper boxes, it would be nice if it became the norm to go into stores with our own containers to put our food in instead of using store-provided, single-use packaging. It's ok if they're plastic as long as they're intended and made to be used and reused for years.
Every grocery store talks about "shrink" in their Form 10K. They buy extra fruits, vegetables, and meat so that the consumer has a full shelf or display to select from. XX% of that goes unsold, gets processed into prepared food (chopped fruits/vegetables, etc.), and then what's unsold from that gets tossed or donated.
Farmer's Markets have shrink too -- and the lack of climate control means that spoilage happens on the order of days, rather than weeks.
It would not. If I (and frozen vegetable buyers in general) switch to buying fresh vegetables, the market will increase production of fresh vegetables to compensate.
>shop somewhere closer to home
I already shop as close to home as possible.
Possible scenario: People will tell you they prefer low-waste packaging when you ask them in a survey. But when they're at a store trying to pick out an item, they still end up perceiving the item in the small paper box as being lower quality than the one in the giant clear plastic clamshell whose contents are clearly visible. So, regardless of what they said they prefer, in reality they might still tend to go for the high-waste packaging.
The worst packaging I ever saw was a chicken curry and rice meal in 2 compartments, each covered in non-recyclable clear film. In addition, the rice container was non-recyclable while the chicken container was (!) We now hear statements that black plastic containers are not always recyclable, so maybe I should have just thrown the whole lot in the garbage anyway...
In a way it's a shame, in a way it's an annoyance, but realistically it seems possible only a fraction of that black plastic was ever truly being recycled anyway.
People, in general, are bad at long term thinking, and they aren't going to pour hours of research into what type of packaging they are going to use. People also think that their singular actions are not going to have that much effect on the bigger picture. While this may be true, everyone cannot think this way.
That cost is, depending on the market, about $80/tonne. Pricing in the cost of disposal would add about 0.04 cents to the cost of a plastic bag and 0.24 cents to the price of a large bottle of soda.
Plastic is not a problem. It has never been a problem and it never will be a problem. Eliminating plastic packaging is at best a complete waste of time and at worst totally counter-productive.
Climate change is a catastrophe; we have already passed the point of no return, and can now only choose how severe that catastrophe will be.
http://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/studies/pdf/eucostwast...
https://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/2e935b...
Why is there plastic in every corner of the planet[0]?
Why is there trash covered islands that humans don't live on and should be pristine[1]?
Maybe banning plastics is not the answer and responsible disposal is the correct answer, but there is currently a very large plastics problem that must be addressed.
[0]https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-47947235
[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2017/05/15/henderson-i...
You are right, but I suppose you mean "we", like in "we the people".
Maybe go for the aluminum can instead. In the age of single-stream recycling, glass doesn't get recycled all that much more than plastic does. (Some sources suggest it gets recycled even less.) Worse, it tends to render other materials unrecyclable when it shatters and contaminates them with shards.
Also, the can weighs less, which means less pollution incidental to transportation.
I sometimes wonder if i should crush all of my glass bottle before tossing them in the trash; or to "recycle" them more quickly, drop them somewhere in deep water; though I suppose if it were near a continental shelf, it would be even better.
Some music festivals use '10 empty plastic cups = 1 free drink' to reduce the amount of single-use plastic trash laying around. It's simple economics.
Aluminium cans are some of the best items to be recycled, as recycling one takes only 5% of the energy needed for creating one anew. This should be reflected as a higher deposit of course, to get high return rates. I think Finland achieves nowadays over 95% return rate for aluminium cans.
Might be better to switch to aluminum. The recycling system appears more advanced.
I for one would welcome a switch back to reusable soda and beer bottles that were collected. (see Oregon bottle deposits)
> At least 90% of today’s food cans have replaced linings that previously contained the controversial chemical bisphenol-A (BPA), according to the Can Manufacturers Institute. This is in reaction to market demands for more options in food safety.
> Food can linings now are typically made from acrylic and polyester. And all new materials are extensively tested and are cleared by regulatory agencies before being sold in the market. Linings are necessary to prevent the can from corroding, provide a barrier to bacteria and maintain food quality.
I admit I've not researched the topic much, and would love to learn that safer materials are used now.
Available research has left us with a reasonable idea of the bounds on BPA toxicity, and seems to indicate that, in the amounts you get from modern cans, the effect, while non-zero, is probably quite small, possibly to the point of being negligible in the grand scheme of things.
For example, the bacteria and yeast that ferment food also tend to produce all sorts of known carcinogens and toxins. I'd personally expect the fermentation by-products present in my sauerkraut to have a much bigger effect on my health than the BPA that's used to line the can it's packaged in. That seems to be borne out in the science, too, insofar as the health risks associated with eating pickles are readily observable in humans at normal consumption levels, but it seems to take obscenely large megadoses of BPA to make a lab rat sick.
Available research has also left us with a reasonable idea of the health impact of air pollution, including from diesel truck exhaust. And I would guess that the health impact from the extra air pollution produced in shipping heavier glass containers instead of lighter aluminum ones is greater than that of the BPA dose you'd get from cans' linings.
No. It's worse than plastic, even if the bottles are re-used rather than recycled.
http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Final%20Report%20Doo...
And the manufacturers/retailers need to stop claiming that they are only responding to "market demand" - in numerous decades of buying stuff, no-one has ever asked me what my packaging preferences are. There'll come a time when we can't recycle our way out of our own mess - what will be Big Pollutions smug solution be then?