In our food values discussions, packaging has come up repeatedly. Many people want to reduce the waste associated with packaging: plastics, metals, paper products, etc., but today while I was packaging yogurts, I was struck by one aspect of packaging that I hadn't spent much time considering. Until now, I hadn't considered the health impacts of farmers and food producers who are exposed to packaging. Today I was packaging yogurts and sealing them with the shrink wrap and the heat gun and I was exposed to doses of phthalates and other chemicals found in plastics (and especially bad in shrink wrap because of the heat). And if you consider that labeling that yogurt happens at least once a week for about 52 times a year, that isn't an insignificant dose of chemicals. And over the course of a few years, the endocrine disruption by the plastics would be potentially irreversible.
Packaging can and must be improved. Food packaging cannot go away. It has lengthened the shelf life of our food and helped reduce food waste (albeit while increasing other waste). By improving packaging through investment in the field of green chemistry, we could reduce the chemical exposure of packagers and landfill waste.
Thoughtful post, Taryn. I also wonder about the significance of packaging in general next to other ways in which we consume and abuse the environment. How does it stack up against other forms of waste we produce (green house gasses, wasted food, other kinds of garbage, etc), and how do we measure the overall impact of these things? I know that every little thing we do matters, but some things matter a lot more than others. Our addiction to fossil fuels strikes me personally as a much more significant problem than packaging, and yet it drives me nuts when people use plastic bags at grocery stores.
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