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Comment by georgia_peach | Hacker News Reader

There was a time--not too long ago actually--when the standards were waxed paper, parchment paper, and glass. Paper being biodegradable, glass being highly inert, and neither causing as much ecological devastation or endocrine disruption as plastic.

So technically speaking, it's a solved problem. But from a market perspective, for the people who eat the glyphosate-dusted insulin resistance that's wrapped inside the plastic, i'm willing to bet the pseudoestrogens are the least of their worries.

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Food doesn’t last as long in those first two, so it results in more food waste and fuel usage. Glass is heavy and is energy intensive to process.

The EU has done tons of studies on pros and cons of different food packaging technology and their overall impact to these other factors.

Personally speaking, I would prefer to use a little more fuel, and "waste" a little more food, if that meant having fewer microplastics circulating in my blood stream.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...

After all, if they're in my bloodstream, they're probably everywhere, and if we happen to discover anything more harmful about that than endocrine disruption, good luck pulling all of that plastic back out of the environment.

Glass uses very little energy, creates very little waste, when it is re-collected & washed--a common practice as recently as the early 1980s.

I quote the word "waste" because I remember how things were. In the glass & paper days, we didn't waste nearly as much food as people do today. No one did. The fast food / fast casual dining experiences--which have popped up everywhere--are monuments of food waste. If you don't believe me, ask any of the employees how much food they throw away on a daily basis.

Burning fuel creates waste because motion of vehicles, tires, etc. creates micro plastics…

You are arguing that the weight difference between the containers (not the contents, which usually--rationally!--far outweigh their container) is going to wear more rubber off the tires and into the environment than the truckload of plastic containers themselves. That is ridiculous.

It’s a fun calculation, glass is more than an order of magnitude heavier, multiply that by the $200B food packaging industry and you get some big numbers :)

When those materials were the standard we also didn't have a lot of the medical and technological equipment today that arguably reduced both mortality and morbidity across large swaths of a much, much larger population. Plastics are used widely in electronics and all of the accompanying tech improvements too it isn't just simple as packaging, so it isn't a "solved problem" if you want to go back to those materials and replace everything plastic has become standard for in today's technologies.

What does "pthalates in food packaging" have to do with medicine or technology? For food it is a solved problem.

Also, #1 contribution to life expectancy has been public hygiene. Aside from antibiotics, all of the other medical interventions have been noise.

https://sjbpublichealth.org/200-years-public-health-doubled-...

> the largest gain in life expectancy occurred between 1880 and 1920 due to public health improvements such as control of infectious diseases, more abundant and safer foods, cleaner water, and other nonmedical social improvements

The plastics, which might as well be considered solidified gasoline, are also a tremendous hazard in home furnishings[0]. The flame-retardants slow the burn a little, but still highly combustible compared to traditional materials. The science is pointing the finger at the same flame retardants for raising cancer rates among firefighters around 10% higher than the general population[1,2].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87hAnxuh1g8

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8403436/

[2] https://www.sffcpf.org/news-post-2/

The future will look unkindly at our present day pursuit of profits whilst ignoring negative externalities.

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