Re-used containers means reduced food-life after buying it or more preservatives, and higher chance of contamination. That will increase probability of food-poison. More wastage, more food needs to be produced, more environmental impact
On the topic of reusing bags, I wish it were as simple as stopping using single-use plastic bags. The most "environmental-friendly" alternative seems to be reusable-bags made of polyester PET(recycled), but you still have to reuse them on average more than ~35 times in order to have less environmental impact. graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/grocery-bag-environmental...
"In fact, studies have shown that when we compare environmental impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions, energy, water and resource use, plastic packaging tends to have a net positive impact. The impact of plastic production and handling is lower than the impacts which would result from food waste without packaging."
Similar situation when ditching plastic or composites for glass bottles. You need a large number of reuses of the glass container (break-even at around 30-50 reuses) or you will actually end up with a net increase in emissions. Recycling glass should be a last resort, as it requires a lot of energy (compared to e.g. recycling PET bottles). Because glass is so much heavier than plastic packaging, transport distances also need to be kept low (good in general). If transport distance exceeds something like 500 km, a glass bottle will always result in higher net emissions than a tetra pack, even if reused a billion times.
But it's not just about emissions. Throw glass in a hedge, and it's pretty inert: a shiny rock. Throw plastic in a hedge, and it'll drift and get stuck around something, or get eaten by something that really shouldn't be eating it, or break up into tiny pieces and poison the entire food chain… likely all three, and more.
The biggest issue with plastic stuff in the wild is that things get stuck in it, especially marine wildlife, and birds and some other animals getting digestive problems when tearing it apart and eating it.
On the flip side, most plastic packaging (mainly PE and PP) is non-toxic and biology doesn't really interact with it at all, even if you reduce it to microplastics. Yeah, that stuff is pretty much everywhere - but it's not really doing anything.
> On the flip side, most plastic packaging (mainly PE and PP) is non-toxic and biology doesn't really interact with it at all, even if you reduce it to microplastics. Yeah, that stuff is pretty much everywhere - but it's not really doing anything.
We're just starting to understand the harms plastics are causing to our health as we increasingly find plastics in places like our blood, our stool, and in our unborn children. There are already plenty of concerns about plastics resulting in hazardous exposure to endocrine disruptors. It's pervasive across the food chain as well. The idea that "it's not really doing anything" requires a dismal of all the harms we know about already and a remarkable level of optimism about what we will or wont find out in the future.
No. Like I said, PE and PP - which are the vast majority of plastic packaging, especially for foods, because the materials you are referring to are not food-safe in the first place - are biologically inert.
In fact, the monomers of PE and PP (ethylene and propene) are also not toxic, which is uncommon (compare with e.g. PVC: vinylchloride is toxic in all sorts of ways, polystyrol: styrene is also toxic in a few ways and damages DNA, teflon: it's monomer is also a carcinogen). This is important, because making plastics generally leaves precursors in the finished product: the more the worse the process control is, which costs money and requires know-how.
See e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23862761/ for a study looking at whether these are EDC; they're not: "There were no significant differences between test and control groups in vagina or uterine weight. Data suggest that effluents from plastic food containers do not appear to produce significant adverse effects according to Hershberger and uterotrophic assays."
The single most problematic plastic for health purposes is PVC. PVC in its chemically pure form (difficult to do) isn't bad, either. But pure PVC is a hard, brittle plastic, which is not that useful. So most PVC products consist of a large portion of plasticizer; some products (e.g. cables and other types of very soft PVC) are actually more plasticizer than PVC both by weight and volume. Both PVC and toxic paints are a popular choice for all kinds of toys.
It's true that not all plastics are EDC, but that doesn't mean that accumulation of those non-toxic plastics in our bodies is harmless either. There is very little research on this at this time, but studies done in animals (mostly sea critters) suggest that plastics accumulating in their bodies could lead to problems such as metabolic disorders, reduced feeding, energy deficiency, infertility, immune responses and inflammation, oxidative stress, etc.
It's too soon to say what health impacts these plastics in our own bodies are having which makes it far far too early to have any confidence that there are none.
It's a good point to make that something can be inert and non-toxic and still cause issues. And we indeed don't have the data yet to say for certain what the result is, however, what we can tell so far is that there are no overt issues; the article uses asbestos as an example, but we're pretty confident that the effect level isn't anything like that.
Personally it seems far more likely to me that globally observed health issues are caused by the proliferation of chemicals in everyday life that we know are definitely toxic. So IMHO an excellent plastic to blame if you need one is e.g. PVC (and also PTFE because OH BOY WHAT A SMART IDEA TO PUT THAT SHIT ON PANS WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG I HAVE NO IDEA).
(This part made me laugh a little: "Microplastics are plastic fragments less than 5 millimeters in diameter, or about 0.2 inches, barely visible to the human eye. ")
Re-using glass containers is actually an extremely low chance of contamination. We have had easy glass sterilization techniques for a long time (most dishwashers have a sanitization cycle). Further, your shelf life won’t be significantly reduced, unless you just don’t clean your containers.
The underlying argument you were responding to wasn’t really greenhouse gas focused. The discussion was mostly about plastic waste in the oceans and our environment. While it is possible the greenhouse gas budget is better with plastic, this doesn’t address the problem of accumulating forever waste within our environment.
On the topic of reusing bags, I wish it were as simple as stopping using single-use plastic bags. The most "environmental-friendly" alternative seems to be reusable-bags made of polyester PET(recycled), but you still have to reuse them on average more than ~35 times in order to have less environmental impact. graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/grocery-bag-environmental...
more info: https://ourworldindata.org/faq-on-plastics#are-plastic-alter...
"In fact, studies have shown that when we compare environmental impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions, energy, water and resource use, plastic packaging tends to have a net positive impact. The impact of plastic production and handling is lower than the impacts which would result from food waste without packaging."