Taken literally, you're right, but in effect their point remains that paper (food containers) nonetheless can be toxic.
I think the main point is this is a serious issue but there's still time to phase this stuff out of our lives without it causing a massive inconvenience. They mentioned at the bottom of the article there's an effort in the UN to organize an agreement to ban plastics, and the authors called for transparency requirements from the plastics industry.
That wasn't really their point. Their point was that paper containers are toxic, but it's a lie by omission to call them just paper containers.
If they had just written a good faith article pointing out that paper containers typically also contain PLA and this is known to be toxic in the environment, all would be well.
"PLA lined paper containers are toxic in the environment" would be a fair title.
This might seem pedantic but we have to draw a line between good faith activism and intentionally misleading activism.
Cups that are 100% paper don't exist, because you can't hold the liquids people drink in paper. Everyone calls "paper cups lined with some material" just "paper cups".
Whether there is a microscopic lining, or the plastic is an inch thick, the amount that leaches off, especially in the presence of a hot food substance, that's the amount that's harmful, and any leaching is going to be in small, frequent doses over a large period of time, and that's the harm they'll find.
That isn't at all what they are studying, so while you may be correct, the point is irrelevant. The article is specifically about degredation in wet soil.
What's harmful in that? Where are the studies that show that it is harmful?
I write this comment on plastic, got to work in a mostly plastic car, drink my coffee out of plastic packaging, have my lunch in plastic containers.
I'm sure there should be long term health effects already discovered based on the ubiquity of plastics of all sorts.
Oh, yeah, that's no secret. Anything that touches food is lined to within an inch of its life with plastic. There's no escaping that. Every soda can you drink, most of your reusable water bottles, all that supposedly eco-friendly packaging is loaded with plastic.
And they can BPA-free you all they want, but they just keep shifting to newer, less tested substances that don't have a bad reputation yet.
This is true only for old or expensive crystal glasses.
Most common soda-lime glass has negligible amounts of undesirable impurities, while borosilicate glass, like I use for my food and drinks, is even more pure and it contains almost nothing besides oxides of silicon, boron, sodium and aluminum, and it is inert in contact with food.
In short, only the enamelled decorations may contain heavy metals, which leech in the environment after use. This is a serious problem, but not with glass as such.
Except we didn't; wine and spirits come almost exclusively in glass bottles, beer is frequently in glass (although cans are also used), almost every store will have some sodas and bottled water in glass, most people at home and restaurants use glasses made from, well, glass, etc.
I don't use drugs. But my understanding is that plastic bottles aren't exactly uncommon even for spirits. And then with wines you get the boxed stuff. A carboard box, with plastic/foil bag inside.
Hm... I think in Europe most if not all of the alcohol comes in glass (or also still sometimes a tin can). Only some beer is in plastic bottles, but most would say that is a sin and a no go and never touch it.
I've only seen plastic bottles for very small bottles: the type you get in a mini-bar or airplane. If you go to a supermarket or off-license you typically won't find non-glass bottles for regular-sized wine or spirits.
I do use drugs. I have never seen spirits in a plastic bottle, even own brand super market vodka.
Boxed wine exists, and is a bit under half the market (by volume). Wine in glasses is still the majority of sales. Beer/cider/larger is sold in cans or bottles, with cans being about 2/3rd by volume.
I do drugs as well, but I don't typically drink alcohol. Maybe I am not qualified to speak on this, but in the US most of the cheap vodkas have been coming in plastic bottles for around 15 years now at least.
Glass is a little bit better at keeping oxygen out than plastic, dark glass keeps UV rays at bay, and thick glass bottles can better withstand the pressure of a second fermentation in the bottle, as with champagne and abbey beers. It also looks nice. These are advantages for beer and wine, but mostly irrelevant for soda, water and juices.
Maybe it's some mass illusion, but most people say that drinking from glass bottles tastes significantly better. Personally cans taste bad, plastic somewhat better.
Cans are lined with plastic on the inside, otherwise aluminium would react with acidic soda. There is no practical difference in that regard between a plastic bottle and an aluminium can lined with plastic
I like drinking from a can; your mouth still touches the metal while you drink, so while the flavour of the liquid as such is unaffected, it still changes the overall "flavour experience" (for either better or worse, depending on personal tastes).
If you pour it out in a glass it makes no difference.
It's easy to purchase Mexican sodas around here, and these are never in plastic. Also the more upscale or organic soda companies such as Jones or Reed's, always glass.
Glass is awesome. It's reusable many times over and recyclable after that. We used to have systems to allow that reuse (bottle return) before somehow we ended up throwing away a plastic bottle (recycled at best) every time we buy a pint of milk.
And contrary to sibling comment, glass containers don't leach heavy metals (or anything else) into food.
That's what the grandparent sensibly referred to as reuse; you can do that, but you after you're done reusing it, you can also recycle it, that is, melt it down and make new glass from it.
It's much heavier to cart around, which must be factored in. There's absolutely nothing inherently harmful in single use plastics if they get properly disposed of in landfill.
Driving heavy glass back and forth from the bottling plant burns a lot of diesel unnecessarily.
Plastic bottles are more environmentally friendly.
Glass requires massively more energy to manufacture, even using 100% recycled glass. Glass is heavy, so it's more expensive to transport. Collecting and washing bottles for re-use consumes a substantial amount of energy, which greatly increases the number of trips required to break even on the higher manufacturing impacts. The lifespan of a re-usable glass bottle is relatively very short, because glass is fragile. Glass compares poorly to HDPE when we factor in a realistic lifespan for glass and a realistic recycling rate for HDPE.
They are currently, but only because we're crap at reuse. Glass bottles are highly reusable - 15 times or more on average - before they need to be recycled (i.e. melted).
Minimising the transport costs is part of the design of the reuse process. Milk floats are a great example of this. Milk delivered to the door by an electrical vehicle daily and empties collected by the same vehicle, washed and refilled. This was the standard way to get milk (and often juice, eggs, etc) in my childhood but nowadays people throw a plastic bottle into a generic recycling stream every time and I highly doubt it's an improvement.
Online grocery shopping reduces fuel usage and pollution for getting goods to homes by consolidating many deliveries in one vehicle round. It would be great to see this being used (again) as a way of improving packaging efficiency too, one way or another.
What? Definitely happens, latest when one of the cheaper thinner bottle types have been sitting a bit too long in the hot the plastic taste becomes intense.
And even if below noticing levels I think plastic molecules have been detected in such beverages, but uncertain here.
Which is sometimes unavoidable, but to be precise, the same even on hot days without direct sun exposure, lets stop pea counting. You will easily find studies that stuff from PET production like acetaldehyde goes into the beverage and impacts taste.
But certainly also kind of what you are used to, always surprising for some folks to learn that for others chlorine water is associated with freshness, while clean water is a bit foul.
There is absolutely a difference in perception, especially noticeable with metal/non-metal.
Drink a soda from a can and then the same kind from a glass? Night and day. Try experimenting with spoons to eat: wooden, plastic, different metals. You really notice that, or you should: the spoon goes right on your tongue to introduce the food.
The issue is that while you can drink out of glassware or ceramics (I enjoy those for my coffee and tea), basically everything is carted around in plastic.
If you want to buy water when you're out and about and want it in a glass bottle, your only choices are the "premium" brands that cost an arm and a leg.
And, more generally, it's pretty darn hard to avoid plastics when buying food. When I was a kid, when my parents bought meat from the butcher, it would be wrapped in actual paper, or close enough that it would become unusable once home, and they had to move the meat to solid containers. Nowadays, that "paper" seems to be able to withstand whatever you throw at it. Packaged meats and cheeses always come wrapped in some kind of plastic. The only food I still see in glass containers are "canned" vegetables.
Even if you avoid plastic in the final retail product, there is a pretty good chance the raw materials were transported from the source or within processing facilities in plastic or plastic-lined containers.
In this study recycled glass bottles were not better when it comes to microplastics. It's everywhere. In lids, detergents etc. In fact, single-use plastic bottles did best!
There is plastic-free paper and cardboard packaging. But that is normally loaded with PFAS which is used to stop paper from breaking down when exposed to food fats. However PFAS is a chemical that accumulates in the human body and has been linked to cancer, liver damager, decreased fertility, asthma, and thyroid damage.
So yeah, you can remove the plastic lining from paper, but that severely decreases our quality of life.
Maybe wrap it in five sheets of paper and wrap that in plastic. It should hold enough for the trip home and should help limit the amount of chemicals moving into the actual food. At home, you can move the food into glass containers for storage.
One time I was grabbing Mexican food after an arduous night of clubbing with my friend Rachel, who wore green dreads, smelled of patchouli, and was a member of Food Not Bombs.
We went to the taco stand which was known as the "drive-by shooting" place, and got carne asada quesadillas or something, and she told me to insist that they not use any packaging on them, but just put them in our hands. We "single-handedly" saved the planet that night!
Polyethylene doesn't seem that new or untested, and it's unlikely for it to contain rings, so it doesn't seem so bad. Perhaps the catalyst used that can't be pulled out after. Last time I checked I think it was a homogeneous chromium based catalyst that is used for PE, but it ends up being a very small amount left over.
Pure polyethylene and polypropylene are completely inert and safe in contact with food (if they are not heated).
The problem is that it is currently impossible to know whether the PE or PP used in some plastic vessel is pure or it contains significant quantities of various fillers that have been added for reducing the cost of the material or the cost of various processing steps through which it has passed.
The PE or PP vessels that are translucent and not colored are more likely to contain less undesirable fillers than the vessels that are opaque and/or colored.
What is needed is to have stricter laws about food-contact materials, where the manufacturer must disclose the exact chemical composition of such materials and they must not be able to claim that this is proprietary information that may be kept secret, like today.
My wife cut up a lot of cloth sheets... linens, I think... and bathed them in a boiling mix of beeswax and a couple other waxes and oils. (I believe leather was treated similarly to build ancient armor.)
Messy process, but once they dried, they actually functioned pretty well as a reusable wrap and cover. Stiff enough to hold their shape, self-adherent, it can be used like cling wrap or aluminum foil, and could be cleaned and reused dozens of times.
Not sure if it is a net positive or negative for the environment, but it's at least practical.
I mean, it's a polymer all right, so is starch, but the point is to use something watertight but still biodegradable. Other petroleum derivatives could be used as well, but I tend to think of beeswax as proven to be food-compatible, though I am not sure if this was rigorously tested.
I thought answers to my comment would rather focus on the low melting point, making it hard to use for hot beverages (though 60°C is high enough for drinks).
You are right of course, but the article mentioned PLA, IIRC? Reading more on this topic, it seems that PLA is biodegradable, but only in industrial, high temperature composters?
The author's point out how before the Second World War, people had to be taught how to adapt to a consumable life style, and therefore we can (and must) continue to adapt to a more sustainable lifestyle.
I'll adapt as soon as they stop selling us unrepairable kitchen appliances that break 2 months after warranty expiration, and cars that are following the same path of enshittification.
Hmm, is there at this point even possibility to have a safe drink? The containers are one thing, but what about the whole chain how coffee is made and water is sourced? What container is it brewed in, what about various steps in processing the beans? Growing the beans?
If plastic is worse than paper, and a paper cup has a plastic lining, where the total mass of plastic in the paper cup is less than a wholly plastic cup, this still seems a win.
There seems a risk that articles like this that equate plastic to plastic-coated-paper will lead to people treating them as equal, so they may as well use the more convenient one, which seems at odds with the nominal agenda of trashing the environment less.
My grandma (who’s a 96yo healthy and strong individual) still uses pottery for almost all daily drinks/foods and was advising me to do so, guess that’s the secret.
In the case of my grandma, she actually lives in a farm, she gets the water from a well in there (yes, the type of well with bailer bucket!), but probably for everyone else including myself, yes, that water is going through all that plastic pipes including all these forever chemicals and what not.
The title of the actual academic paper linked in the press release is "Single-use take-away cups of paper are as toxic to aquatic midge larvae as plastic cups", which seems more focused.
It's a real shame when universities themselves participant in the tabloidification of how their research is presented.
Would much prefer to see them promoting scientific literacy rather than trying to be as 'attention grabbing' as possible.
As long as we have separate "Communication and Marketing" departments at universities, this won't change because the people who work there are equally decoupled from research as are journalists. I really had to fight our Communication and Marketing office to _not_ modify the message of a research in order to make it more "appealing" to the wider public.
I don't know if hemp plastic is better or not, but I wouldn't take a manufacturer's website word for it, as they're clearly not an impartial source.
That website also contains a number of red flags: disable text selection and right click, excessive use of superlatives, no details on why it's better/less toxic than other bioplastics, no hint of even the slightest study on hemp plastic.
Maybe hemp plastic really is loads better, that would be fantastic! But that link didn't convince me.
Edible waxes or shellacs have been used for a long time, but PLA is easier to get and work with given the fossil infrastructure that already exists (path dependence).
That being said, PLA is pretty benign. Back when I was in pharma we used it in a variety of formulations and never saw anything in animal histopath (as expected — that’s why we used it). It’s a pretty common excipient. This result is interesting, perhaps minor perhaps not.
And let’s not forget that the discarded cups themselves clog waterways and interact otherwise with the local ecosystem (as housing for some animals, pests or not), change the local pH of standing water etc…
90 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadThere is a reason most chemistry equipment is made of glass...
Even then, there are quite a lot of glass additives, contaminants and cleaning products which can pose some risk
[1]: https://digitalfire.com/glossary/lead+in+ceramic+glazes
"Just as toxic" reads, obviously, as "as bad as", with the implication that paper is as bad as plastic.
But the article ignores paper entirely and focuses on the use of PLA liners in (some) paper cups and lids.
So, already there is obviously far less potentially toxic material and so already the title is untrue.
Then the article states that there are "as many chemicals" in PLA as regular plastics.
Ok? But what those chemicals are obviously matters?
They say that mosquito larvae were negatively affected by both paper and plastic cups, but not to what degrees.
This, at least as presented, is trash.
I think the main point is this is a serious issue but there's still time to phase this stuff out of our lives without it causing a massive inconvenience. They mentioned at the bottom of the article there's an effort in the UN to organize an agreement to ban plastics, and the authors called for transparency requirements from the plastics industry.
If they had just written a good faith article pointing out that paper containers typically also contain PLA and this is known to be toxic in the environment, all would be well.
"PLA lined paper containers are toxic in the environment" would be a fair title.
This might seem pedantic but we have to draw a line between good faith activism and intentionally misleading activism.
And they can BPA-free you all they want, but they just keep shifting to newer, less tested substances that don't have a bad reputation yet.
It's expensive, it's brittle, it's heavy, it takes up a lot of space.
Most common soda-lime glass has negligible amounts of undesirable impurities, while borosilicate glass, like I use for my food and drinks, is even more pure and it contains almost nothing besides oxides of silicon, boron, sodium and aluminum, and it is inert in contact with food.
In short, only the enamelled decorations may contain heavy metals, which leech in the environment after use. This is a serious problem, but not with glass as such.
Except we didn't; wine and spirits come almost exclusively in glass bottles, beer is frequently in glass (although cans are also used), almost every store will have some sodas and bottled water in glass, most people at home and restaurants use glasses made from, well, glass, etc.
Boxed wine exists, and is a bit under half the market (by volume). Wine in glasses is still the majority of sales. Beer/cider/larger is sold in cans or bottles, with cans being about 2/3rd by volume.
If you pour it out in a glass it makes no difference.
And contrary to sibling comment, glass containers don't leach heavy metals (or anything else) into food.
Driving heavy glass back and forth from the bottling plant burns a lot of diesel unnecessarily.
Glass requires massively more energy to manufacture, even using 100% recycled glass. Glass is heavy, so it's more expensive to transport. Collecting and washing bottles for re-use consumes a substantial amount of energy, which greatly increases the number of trips required to break even on the higher manufacturing impacts. The lifespan of a re-usable glass bottle is relatively very short, because glass is fragile. Glass compares poorly to HDPE when we factor in a realistic lifespan for glass and a realistic recycling rate for HDPE.
Minimising the transport costs is part of the design of the reuse process. Milk floats are a great example of this. Milk delivered to the door by an electrical vehicle daily and empties collected by the same vehicle, washed and refilled. This was the standard way to get milk (and often juice, eggs, etc) in my childhood but nowadays people throw a plastic bottle into a generic recycling stream every time and I highly doubt it's an improvement.
Online grocery shopping reduces fuel usage and pollution for getting goods to homes by consolidating many deliveries in one vehicle round. It would be great to see this being used (again) as a way of improving packaging efficiency too, one way or another.
And even if below noticing levels I think plastic molecules have been detected in such beverages, but uncertain here.
But certainly also kind of what you are used to, always surprising for some folks to learn that for others chlorine water is associated with freshness, while clean water is a bit foul.
Drink a soda from a can and then the same kind from a glass? Night and day. Try experimenting with spoons to eat: wooden, plastic, different metals. You really notice that, or you should: the spoon goes right on your tongue to introduce the food.
If you want to buy water when you're out and about and want it in a glass bottle, your only choices are the "premium" brands that cost an arm and a leg.
And, more generally, it's pretty darn hard to avoid plastics when buying food. When I was a kid, when my parents bought meat from the butcher, it would be wrapped in actual paper, or close enough that it would become unusable once home, and they had to move the meat to solid containers. Nowadays, that "paper" seems to be able to withstand whatever you throw at it. Packaged meats and cheeses always come wrapped in some kind of plastic. The only food I still see in glass containers are "canned" vegetables.
I'd say it's silicone impregnated paper like parchment paper or probably is parchment paper which is paper coated with silicone.
way worse than PLA.
http://igui-ecologia.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/202...
So yeah, you can remove the plastic lining from paper, but that severely decreases our quality of life.
We went to the taco stand which was known as the "drive-by shooting" place, and got carne asada quesadillas or something, and she told me to insist that they not use any packaging on them, but just put them in our hands. We "single-handedly" saved the planet that night!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waxed_paper
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greaseproof_paper
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchment_paper
The problem is that it is currently impossible to know whether the PE or PP used in some plastic vessel is pure or it contains significant quantities of various fillers that have been added for reducing the cost of the material or the cost of various processing steps through which it has passed.
The PE or PP vessels that are translucent and not colored are more likely to contain less undesirable fillers than the vessels that are opaque and/or colored.
What is needed is to have stricter laws about food-contact materials, where the manufacturer must disclose the exact chemical composition of such materials and they must not be able to claim that this is proprietary information that may be kept secret, like today.
Messy process, but once they dried, they actually functioned pretty well as a reusable wrap and cover. Stiff enough to hold their shape, self-adherent, it can be used like cling wrap or aluminum foil, and could be cleaned and reused dozens of times.
Not sure if it is a net positive or negative for the environment, but it's at least practical.
> I guess they could coat them in something else, like beeswax
Beeswax is a plastic, just not a petrochemical-derived plastic.
I thought answers to my comment would rather focus on the low melting point, making it hard to use for hot beverages (though 60°C is high enough for drinks).
You are right of course, but the article mentioned PLA, IIRC? Reading more on this topic, it seems that PLA is biodegradable, but only in industrial, high temperature composters?
Hell, even reusable plastic containers get stolen:
https://packagingeurope.com/news/reusable-mcdonalds-packagin...
Sigh.
And same goes for everything.
There seems a risk that articles like this that equate plastic to plastic-coated-paper will lead to people treating them as equal, so they may as well use the more convenient one, which seems at odds with the nominal agenda of trashing the environment less.
It's a real shame when universities themselves participant in the tabloidification of how their research is presented.
Would much prefer to see them promoting scientific literacy rather than trying to be as 'attention grabbing' as possible.
[0]: https://www.plantswitch.com/hemp-plastic/
That website also contains a number of red flags: disable text selection and right click, excessive use of superlatives, no details on why it's better/less toxic than other bioplastics, no hint of even the slightest study on hemp plastic.
Maybe hemp plastic really is loads better, that would be fantastic! But that link didn't convince me.
That being said, PLA is pretty benign. Back when I was in pharma we used it in a variety of formulations and never saw anything in animal histopath (as expected — that’s why we used it). It’s a pretty common excipient. This result is interesting, perhaps minor perhaps not.
And let’s not forget that the discarded cups themselves clog waterways and interact otherwise with the local ecosystem (as housing for some animals, pests or not), change the local pH of standing water etc…