The Problem with Biodegradable Alternatives for food Packaging

Biodegradable alternatives for food packaging are considered the solution to the plastics problem, but there is a problem with this. Packaging plays a huge role in being sustainable, but consumers sometimes hear about the oceans that are made of garbage and the discarded packaging, and they want to figure out a way to use biodegradable packaging.  If we use this, it’ll offer more spaces in the landfills and not pollute the oceans, right? That’s where people are wrong. The degradable packaging waste is a cool idea but not the right answer for a few reasons, such as the following: 

• The compounds that remain released aren’t intended for oceans and lands

• They usually are more complicated than just getting a plastic bottle from the roadside or the waters too 

• They aren’t environmentally sustainable in terms of design and packaging, and properly collecting and sorting packaging for the correct disposal is not that. 

So if we know that the degrading packaging is the wrong answer, why is this still an option then? That’s because there’s an issue with the degrading packaging waste, since it’s being pushed as a solution. Besides the old additives that currently are in disfavor, there’s a lot of new ones, and they usually are considered distractors, which work to take our attention off of all of this and off of the big problem at hand. Usually, they also take away from the environment that’s there, and for most part, we oftentimes don’t’ look at the food packaging as much, and what it contains. The distractors do include the biotechnology that promotes biodegradation and the degradation of products period. 

Some background 

OXOs do promote degradation in water and on land, and it was adopted as unofficial type of product, and this has a lot of problems to it. For starters, there’s a lot of additives that cause degradation, and they were originally banned because they do ruin the packaging, which does increase the pollution. 

The disposal of this too is quite hard, and it doe impact the environment as well around people too. Other packaging which can be used definitely is hard to recover, and usually it either gets incinerated, or thrown into landfills. Some can be degraded in facilities, but they need to be controlled, and when research showed the degradation of the packaging being uncontrolled and would release a lot of compounds, mostly plastic and paperboard, this definitely caused a lot of concern, and the environmental disasters are so obvious, so bad that the OXOs have been banned in some places, such as the UE and the like. The sustainable packaging coalition is another one that frowns upon this. 

There are still some other companies trying to promote this, so it’s obvious that people didn’t learn from the first time. The new distractors are definitely causing generalized degradation, which isn’t to be desired in a lot of cases, and the biodegradation releases from this do create toxins which can impact our landfills, which covers a lot of space, including where crops are grown. 

This is relevant to the distractors because this can claim to induce the biodegradation of the packaging, and it seems to create a problem in the packaging materials, which then diffuse there. The environment is from there not as controlled, nor is it as responsible, so it’s obvious that this type of plastic packaging is definitely not going to be happy about any of this. With that said, avoid product packaging which utilizes OXOs, since it’s harmful for the environment, and hurts more than helps in most cases.