Re:Just 10% of U.S. plastic gets recycled. A new kind of pla...
by pricecomstock on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @01:25PM
(#19730801)
The actual, physical food waste may be more benign than plastic, but the supply chain that produced it in the first place is not. All the cattle feed and greenhouse gases required to deliver a burger to someone's plate are a problem, but I would argue that it's a bigger problem to use all those same resources to deliver that burger to a landfill. Food taken home as leftovers can easily take the place of another resource-demanding meal.
You aren't wrong about all the waste produced by that process, but I think the better answer is to make portions smaller, not to throw away food as if food waste isn't also a huge problem.
Re:Just 10% of U.S. plastic gets recycled. A new kind of pla...
by jdietrich on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @01:53PM
(#19731080)
>Wasted food that goes to compost or landfill is benign.
No, no, a thousand times no.
Farming is massively carbon-intensive. That handful of leftovers might have resulted in hundreds of grams of CO2 emissions during its production, processing and distribution. Plastic just sits there in landfill, or maybe chokes a sea turtle if someone tosses it in a watercourse. Atmospheric CO2 is causing the greatest crisis in the history of humanity; ocean acidification will likely make the sea turtle extinct within a century.
Using a few grams of plastic to avoid hundreds of grams of CO2 is a huge win.
In my opinion, the place where we need to lay blame for single-use plastic are people who eat take-out food, and people who go to a restaurant and ask for a take-home box to avoid wasting food. Wasted food that goes to compost or landfill is benign. But go to any small or medium sized business that serves food, and you will see stacks and stacks of single use plastic containers. Go to stores that market to small business owners (Costco, Smart & Final) and you'll see dozens of pallets of single-use plastic trays, plates, cups, all for the buying. The sheer scale of single-use food packaging is mind-boggling. The movement against plastic straws at fast-casual and upscale restaurants is fine, but those restaurants usually have reusable glass or metal cups, and we need a real solution for restaurants that serve "regular people".