Paper cups are just as toxic as plastic cups
gu.se
gu.se
"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
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?
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.
Hell, even reusable plastic containers get stolen:
https://packagingeurope.com/news/reusable-mcdonalds-packagin...
There 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
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…
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.
And same goes for everything.
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.
Sigh.