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Comment by Night_Thastus | Hacker News Reader

If you can, there are some great borosilicate glass containers out there. I use them for everything. The ones I have seal well enough that I can fill it with soup and stick it in a backpack, ride somewhere and it's fine on the other side.

Thick enough to be basically unbreakable, microwavable, dishwasher-safe, etc. Don't need to worry about tomato staining either like on plastic. I've been thrilled with mine.

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> basically unbreakable

The clip-retaining rims seem to love to chip on the IKEA 365 style ones.

The long-tabbed GlassLock ones seem less vulnerable to that.

Which not unique to glass boxes, I'm still amazed by how robust the living hinges can be, some are going on 10 years and haven't split yet.

Yeah we’ve got ~20 or so of the Ikea ones and we do love them, but a few have chipped in that way.

They’re still amazing for the price though considering how thick they are and how heat/cold/etc resistant they are. Many other brands crack if dropped even a small distance, or shatter if pouring hot food directly in from the stove.

That's interesting. I have around 10-15 of those IKEA 365 glass containers with plastic lids and have never had them chip. I stick them in the dishwasher all the time.

I have had Lock&Lock ones, of almost exactly the same design, for about 10 years and they're only recently starting become significantly chipped, but I had an IKEA one get a small chip within months. Maybe it's how I stack then without lids (physically don't have cupboard space to store with lids on).

mine quickly chipped as well... also stack without lids FWIW.

Storing leftovers in glass when the entire supply chain is plastic... would be interesting to know how futile this is.

Contaminants/toxins are cumulative, affecting probabilistic negative outcomes. So it always makes sense to do what you can to reduce your exposure.

Your line of thinking here is the same convenient sort of apathy which enables so many to become and/or stay obese.

Fresh plastic, however. Newly made food-grade plastics will 'leak' a lot less microplastics than anything you reuse.

Not the "entire." Watch some food factory vids. A lot of it is metal, waxed cardboard, silicone etc.

It depends on what you buy and where.

Aren't the lids still plastic? I've never seen ones with glass lids.

You can find ones with glass lids.

Here in the UK we're lucky that Pyrex is still borosilicate glass, and there are some I've seen with glass lids that are advertised as "zero plastic".

PYREX all caps should be borosilicate. Indeed harder to get now. Submission from 3d ago on the this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36206565

Snopes found a mixture of true and false in these rumors about Pyrex: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/exploding-pyrex/

And that is fine. We aren't going to be taking our spoons and forks and scraping the food from the plastic lip as we would with the container nor is the lid in contact with food should we warm it in the microware.

real confident bout that, kind of like everyone who said that the rest of the container being plastic was acceptable before...

Perhaps not perfect, but it's at least a massive improvement over all-plastic containers.

I love using these for things like casseroles. I can bake it directly in the container or even freeze a raw casserole and when ready, defrost and bake. One less dirty dish and no need to transfer and make sure it will fit.

Not a huge deal, but heads up from 3d ago that pyrex is now often tempered soda-lime glass & not borosilicate & is somewhat succeptible to thermal shock breakage. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36206565

PYREX all caps should be borosilicate still & mostly immune (within reason).

I learned this one on a very unhappy thanksgiving! It shattered so explosively that every single single food dish was contaminated with glass shards (and some of my blood).

That ended up being a fast food for dinner night.

Aren’t the lids typically plastic though?

Yes, but the vast majority of the container being glass still has advantages. For example, whenever heating it, you'd remove the lid and only be heating the glass.

Actually, on at least some of the range, Ikea advertise that the lid can be used as a splash guard in both microwave and conventional ovens (at least on my local Ikea website that's what it says), and has photos of the whole kaboodle in the oven: https://www.ikea.com/hu/hu/images/products/ikea-365-eteltaro...

Yeah. At least the food usually isn't in contact with the lid though.

I would have assumed (probably incorrectly) that the 'seal' which would come in contact with the glass & liquids would be a type of silicone lid, while it could be considered a type of plastic, if its a good food grade lid, I would imagine it's a bit better ?

Ironically though silicone is much harder to recycle though.

U don’t recycle plastic, you burn it in a furnace. Spread the word.

Not sure if you're serious or not, but plastic should not actually be put in the recycling bin. It almost never gets recycled, and if it does, it degrades quickly and becomes more toxic after recycling.

Plastic is garbage. If you live in a place that burns garbage for energy, that's the best fate for it.

Burning seems to be the only good idea over long-term. But someone on HN explained that there are some toxic byproducts to burning plastic. Dioxins for one. So we need some way to capture those waste and store it along with the nuclear waste lol.

There are such capture devices and they are already in use to burn trash.

You just need a catalytic converter.

Everytime I think I can do even something small to help, more clever people come along and ruin it!

Does remind me of a cool tech about plasma arc recycling.

https://www.explainthatstuff.com/plasma-arc-recycling.html

It can basically recycle anything into energy from what I briefly read.

The lid is often thermoplastic of some sort, sometimes with a rubber gasket and sometimes without.

You can buy glass bowls with glass lids.

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