Single - Use food packaging is destroying our ecosystems.
It is abundantly clear that the waste and pollution that are generated by food packaging are at an all time high. Considering the fact that our landfills and waterways are becoming increasingly clogged with plastic bags, food containers made of Styrofoam, disposable coffee cups, and other items, while great convenience it provides is outweighed by the waste and pollution that they generates.
What do we mean when we say single - use packaging?
Single - Use packaging refers to any type of packaging that can be only used once as the name suggests. This includes your everyday food packaging, things such as cereal boxes, paper coffee cups and other such items.
Why do we say this is unsustainable?
As we all know some brands do double packaging on items which do not require it. While everyday we consume the products, the packaging goes into landfill mostly and generates millions of tons of waste.
For example : Kelloggs's which is the biggest convenience food manufacturer often has used single - use packaging.
Kelloggs had in the past used to utilize single use packaging frequently in their cereal boxes that everyone buys, such as the ever famous Kellogg's cornflakes, K special, and chocos, which are loved by many people.
As we all know, there are two layers of packaging for these cereals, one that is made of a material called card and one that is made of plastic. Although they have recently started making both of these recyclable and biodegradable, many people are not aware of this fact and still frequently throw out the cereal boxes with regular waste as if they are not recyclable.
This is bad for the environment in many ways, as the material used in things like disposable coffee cups and cereal boxes, which is called card, is a material that is made out of trees. By making the box itself, it is wasting a lot of space, as there is already a package inside that contains the cereal. There are statistics that state that we waste around 1 billion trees every year on paper packaging. There are also other products, such as single use paper coffee cups that are actively destroying the environment.
How many of us have purchased coffee on the go?
If you have a cup of coffee on the way to work every day, you will go through an average of 240 throwaway cups in a year. Even if you just get a cup of coffee once a week, you will still have used 52 disposable cups in a year.
Due to a multitude of people doing this in the world, there has been a total waste of 16 billion paper coffee cups and a loss of 6.5 million trees.
Moreover, even on the plastic side of packaging, it is even more unsustainable, as plastic can never truly degrade as it just turns into microplastics when it is left in landfills.
As you can see from the above statistics provided by the plastic soup foundation which is an NGO that tries to spread awareness about plastics, packaging is the biggest use of plastics in Europe.
Plastic can be used in a way that is easy and cheap to help sell food in a modern supermarket. It is quite impossible to avoid coming into contact with single-use plastic packaging, regardless of where you are or what store you frequent. Single-use plastic packaging is everywhere. Living without using plastic may be difficult for even the people who are most concerned about the environment. Even grocery stores that sell essential items are trying to reduce the amount of harmful waste generated by plastic by removing single-use plastic packaging from their stores, but it is simply impossible to remove all of it as there will always be something that has to be covered in plastic to make sure that the essential does not go to waste.
What can we do about it?
Even though it may be impossible to comprehend what life would be like without all of this useful equipment, the majority of it didn't even exist until a very recent period of time. This is something that has only happened quite recently. It became necessary for advances in packaging technology to be made in order to keep up with the changing environment as our food system became less local while simultaneously feeding more people over a greater geographic area. Additionally, as food became more intensively processed, it became necessary for these advancements to be made. Despite the fact that some activities need the use of packaging, the development of the company was completed with little regard for the welfare of either human people or the natural environment. This was the case despite the fact that packaging was required.
A few things you can do are :
Promote companies which follows sustainable products/ packaging
Use reusable methods of packaging.
Recycle packaging - by segregating garbage while disposing
Watch for biodegradable products
In certain countries, you can return some forms of packaging to the shop you bought it from and get around few cents on them back.
A heat-resistant cardboard sleeve is not required for use with reusable travel mugs, making them the most eco-friendly alternative to the traditional paper or plastic coffee cup. In addition to this advantage, reusable travel mugs also save money.
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Dwag, im depressed af and all I want to eat some cereal and now you telling me I cant do that