Sustainability in Food Packaging

We consume food everyday and so is the amount of food packaging that used to wrap up the food. Human has been using packaged food from the day it was invented until now and we do not stop using it; it is just the materials have been changed over the time. For example, there are several materials that are used to produce food packaging: paper, cardboard, glass, plastic, etc. and we keep innovate the components of it with the hope that the less the materials are used to produce, the less it will contaminate to the environment. The reason why we want to lessen the components of the food packaging's product is because first, it is now an important and necessary part of everyone's daily life that human cannot deny the benefits of using it and is hard to replace it with products that are completely safe to environment; second, although it is very useful, it can be a hidden danger to the environment and the eco-system.

We cannot deny the multi-functions of food packaging. By saying that, one of many useful functions that packaging brings us is protection and preservation. For example, it can protect the food by preventing the air from getting into the food. In the 1860s, Louis Pasteur discovered that air carries living organisms, including mold and bacteria., and because of that, not covering the food with packaging will make it spoiled by these bacteria and in some particular ways, can cause illness to human. In common sense, if we leave the food overnight and not cover it with anything, it will probably be spoiled and smelly in the next day because the air surrounding us will react with the components of the food. Covering the food with packaging is a way to keep the food fresh so that it can be edible. Packaging has been an important part of our life that functioned as a way to keep our food safe and prevent outside affects.

The more food packaging people use everyday, the more waste it will release and there is a question: How can food packaging affect us? The answer is, it has a direct impact to human beings as they are thrown to the environment. After being thrown to the environment, some types of food packaging will not be decomposed over time, and they will stay there forever. For example, after being thrown out, plastic bags will not be decomposed with soil they will remain in the agricultural lands and blocks the progress of growth of agricultural plants. It means that the crop cannot grow properly since the plastic bags are blocking their ways of taking nutrition and water from the soil. From that, there are several negative impacts from plastic bags to the agriculture are: (1) reduced soil fertility, (2) reduced nitrogen fixation, (3) larger loss of soil and nutrients, (4) reduced crop yield, and (5) imbalance in soil fauna and flora. Food packaging will contain chemical components since they are produced with chemical. Another example is glass, some glass bottles and jars may contain lead, and researchers at the Institute of Environmental Geochemistry of the University of Heidelberg in Germany showed that waters packaged in glass bottles contained 26-57 times more lead than water bottled in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic. By saying that, the more lead it contains, and the longer people use it, the more poisonous people will get from these food containers. An article on National Geographic in 2015 reported that 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the ocean and 269 000 tons float on the surface. This huge amount of plastic debris in the ocean mainly comes from littering. Human litters a lot to the ocean that it day by day destroys the eco-system down there. The amount of plastic in the ocean has made up about 40$ of the world's ocean surfaces. To explain, marine mammals are impacted by that element, specifically, plastic bags. For example, sea turtles, the species that is unfortunately impacted mostly by plastics. Sea turtles' food chain is jelly-fish and those plastic bags when being thrown to the ocean has is look-alike the jelly-fish so that sea turtles mistakenly eat the bags and choke themselves to death. Water and air environment are two mandatory and most important elements that people use to live on and by throwing food packaging like plastic bags to the ocean or to the agricultural lands are us killing ourselves.

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