Fossil-based plastics cannot be decomposed into carbon dioxide and water like food, wood and paper under natural conditions, and will only be decomposed into plastic microbeads, which will be absorbed by marine animals and plants and terrestrial plants, and eventually enter the human food chain. The details are explained in another article today.
During the epidemic industry slowed down, carbon emissions reduced at the same time, the trend of disposable plastic products, is a steady stream of "ocean PM2.5", eventually or with the food chain back to the table, into the human body.
During the outbreak, the demand for disposable tableware is strong.
Author | Liu Qiang Nagoya University, Japan
Editor | Chen Tianzhen Gao Peiwen
With the acceleration of the pace of modern life, takeout has become a way of life for more and more people. Buying vegetables, washing vegetables, cooking and washing dishes are simplified into a little bit on the mobile phone. The emergence and popularization of take-out has completely realized the perfect balance between people's food to be lived up to and their busyness (laziness). Those express buddies who rush around the streets and lanes have become our most familiar "strangers", conveying the real warm smell of human fireworks in the city in the busy traffic.
During the new crown epidemic, from Wuhan to the whole country, gradually promulgated a number of restrictions on travel and crowd gathering of temporary measures to curb the spread of the epidemic, to the main food restaurants have increased the strength of the takeaway business, to carry out production self-help. In this context,The demand for disposable plastic products, which mainly sell tableware, is extremely strong, largely reversing some progress made in the eradication of disposable plastic products worldwide in recent years..
While we are still deeply concerned about the public health problems caused by the epidemic, an urgent and important question is before the whole society: how many hidden dangers are buried in these continuous growth of disposable plastic products? Is the use of plastic lunch boxes itself absolutely safe?
The emergence of plastic lunch boxes is almost inevitable. "Food is the most important for the people", and the need to dress up food urged human ancestors to explore diligently, and indirectly gave birth to the evolution of various materials. From the original clay pottery, bronze iron and even the ceramics behind, people have never stopped looking for an ideal material that is light, strong and durable.
Like human history from the Stone Age to the Bronze Iron Age, the birth of plastic is an important symbol of modern human civilization. For people who are used to being either heavy as steel or fragile as glass, plastic, which is light in weight, high in strength and easy to shape, is simply a perfect material beyond imagination. Once it is available, it will immediately be loved by people all over the world. All the rage.
Food container material evolution process | Author finishing
At present, the vast majority of takeaway lunch boxes on the market in China are made of plastic. Before we ask whether it is safe or not, we might as well understand it,What is plastic?
Plastic, as the name suggests, isA shapeable materialIt is composed of synthetic resin and fillers, plasticizers, stabilizers, lubricants, colorants and other additives. Its production is like the Lego game of the microscopic world: a steady stream of small molecular components are stitched together to give them functions and outstanding material properties that have never been opened before.
Since the beginning of the 1950 s, plastic products are representative objects of modern life. With the continuous innovation of chemical technology, plastic is also perfectly embedded in a variety of life scenes with its excellent performance, supporting our modern lifestyle. Among these dazzling array of plastic products, food-grade plastic products are directly related to our health because they are in contact with our lips and teeth, and thus deserve special attention.
The earliest plastic actually existed in the 19th century. At that time, it was "celluloid" (I. e. fake ivory) used to replace ivory to make billiards. However, the material was flammable and explosive. Later, after many chemists continuously explored and changed its composition, stable plastic penetrated into the corners of life in the 20th century | mi9
Plastic on the tip of the tongue
Speaking of which, take-out food has actually been available in ancient times in our country. In ancient times, dignitaries wanted to eat the delicious food of restaurants but did not want to go out. They often asked the store to prepare the dishes and put them into a huge multi-layer wooden box to send them to the home, and then sent someone to pick them up after the meal. Such tedious and exquisite meals are naturally expensive and difficult to become a daily routine for ordinary people.
The emergence of cheap and strong plastics has greatly controlled the cost of the food delivery process, and takeout has truly become the new normal of modern life.
Accustomed to the convenience of plastic at the same time, we can not help but wonder, these often stay in the tip of our tongue plastic?
In fact, as long as you pay a little attention to the base of the plastic products you come into contact with everyday, we often see a circular triangle composed of three pointing arrows. There are numbers from 1 to 7 in the triangle, which is the ID card of the plastic. Each number represents which resin matrix the plastic article is made. As consumers, learning the meaning behind these signs and understanding which materials should be used in which environment is of great significance to protect our own health.
Plastic "ID Card" Indicates Plastic Material | Author Finishing
At present, the vast majority of takeaways in the domestic market are packaged in plastic boxes or cartons.
Among them, the numbers05On behalf of the polypropylene (PP) material, commonly used in the production of microwave special lunch box. It can withstand high temperatures of 130 degrees Celsius and has a melting point of up to 167 degrees.The only plastic material that can be heated in a microwave.
It should be noted that some microwave oven lunch boxes are made of 05 PP (polypropylene), but the lid is made of 06 PS (polystyrene). PS has good transparency but is not resistant to high temperature, so it cannot be put into the microwave oven together with the box body.
In addition, although the melting point of polypropylene (PP) material is as high as 167 degrees, it is best to hold things below 110 degrees for safety reasons,Take-out hot porridge soup should not be stored in plastic lunch boxes for too long, but should be eaten as soon as possible..
Objectively speaking, our Chinese food diet likes hot oil in stock soup, high temperature and the addition of a large amount of oil and vinegar seasoning, which makes the inside of the lunch box extremely complicated organic solvent environment. Even the material stability of standard qualified food grade plastic will face great challenges. Among them, there are many illegal businesses in order to save costs, the use of inferior or even not suitable for high-temperature plastic containers to contain food, which is to bring huge health risks to food consumers.
Where is the plastic waste?
For most of us, the biggest temptation to take out food is convenience. Pick up your cell phone and someone will deliver the food to your door with your fingers. You don't have to wash the dishes to clean up after eating and drinking. You can finish a meal as soon as you put the lunch box in the garbage can. But behind this convenience is the massive growth of takeaway plastic tableware and packaging bags in the whole society.
Based on the data of the current three major take-out platforms, Meituan, Hungry Noodles and Baidu take-out,The average daily total order volume reached a staggering 40 million orders.And it is still in the stage of rapid growth. Let's take a takeaway as an example. It usually contains two to three plastic lunch boxes, one to two plastic bags, disposable chopsticks, plastic spoons, plastic soup cups, etc. As a result, our society as a whole generates more than 14.6 billion copies (40 million x 365) of plastic waste a year from takeout orders.
Let's assume that a take-out order only uses one plastic bag (the most optimistic estimate). According to the calculation that each plastic bag is 0.06 square meters, the total area of the outer packaging plastic bags for a day's take-out order is more than 2.4 million square meters, which can cover more than 360 football fields. We haven't counted the plastic protagonists in take-out orders, plastic lunch boxes, plastic spoons and plastic soup cups. It is no exaggeration to say that a mountain of takeaway plastic garbage is rising on the time track of our society.
One day, a take-out plastic garbage mountain is rising on the track of time.
So, where did these mountains of plastic waste end up?
First of all, we would like to thank the city's sanitation and waste sorting workers for their hard work, so that most of the plastic waste can enter the municipal waste disposal system. Technically speaking, landfill can do harmless treatment of these massive plastic wastes in a short period of time. however,The explosive growth of the takeaway industry has led to a rapid increase in plastic tableware waste,Far.beyond the limits of what municipal waste disposal facilities can cope. In some big cities where takeout is more popular, the lag in predicting the growth rate of takeout plastic waste is even more serious, posing a huge threat to the long-term public health of the entire city.
As a result, a large part of the plastic waste that is too late for standardized treatment will be exposed between mountains, rivers, lakes and seas. compared with the amazing output speed and scale of human plastic waste, this exposure is extremely considerable.
Unlike traditional wood, paper and even steel, the degradation rate of plastics is extremely slow, and it takes more than 200 years to complete the physical disappearance in nature.
In 2004, Thompson and others from the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom published a paper on plastic fragments in marine water and sediments in the journal Science. They pointed out for the first time that during the degradation of plastic products, their own unique polymer polymerization will Slowly depolymerize, forming a more dispersed and more secretiveMicroplastics. Most of these microplastics are plastic fragments and particles with a diameter of less than 5mm. They are a mixture of non-uniform plastic particles with various shapes. They are often difficult to distinguish with the naked eye and are vividly called"PM2.5 in the sea".
Studies have shown that 81% of coastal areas are polluted by plastic debris; microplastics have been found in 9 bivalves in the coastal fish market; microplastic particles have been found in the digestive tracts of 233 marine organisms worldwide; by 2050 It is estimated that 99% of birds may eat plastic products-the threat of marine plastic pollution to human health and ecological security is already very serious.
In the end, these microplastics in mountain water bodies are absorbed into the body by all kinds of fish, animals and plants, and then passed through the food chain layer by layer. Humans standing at the top of the food chain will "enjoy" the highest degree of biological enrichment.
Those plastics that we throw away casually, one day, will still hide all kinds of ingredients, serve them on our table, and be eaten by us. Whether it is terrible or not, nature is always joking with human beings in the dimension of time.
The outbreak may make the global ban plastic "reverse"
In the face of the severe ecological situation, the Chinese government has issued a number of plastic bans since 2008, banning the production, sale and use of ultra-thin plastic bags nationwide, and implementing a system of paid use of plastic bags. Since the introduction of the policy, the use of 40 billion plastic bags has been reduced, and relatively positive results have been achieved in a certain period of time.
However, the current epidemic has become a new obstacle on the road to getting rid of plastic completely. On the one hand, affected by the epidemic, the food and beverage market fell precipitously, most chain food and beverage brand revenue fell by more than 50%, the takeaway business has become the only bright spot in the food and beverage industry; on the other hand, due to concerns that the virus will remain on reusable items, businesses and consumers are also actively turning to the use of disposable plastic packaging. Coupled with the decline in global oil (the basic raw material for plastics) prices, the cost of raw materials for plastic production is cheaper, and the combined efforts of several parties have further promoted the contrarian expansion of the plastics industry.
Special circumstances, we can not blame anything, but also must be fully aware that this is a kind of opportunistic behavior to quench thirst, the plastics industry is taking advantage of the epidemic, take advantage of people's fears, the global ban on plastic action "reverse", and this will have a long-term legacy.
Plastic, this great and terrible discovery of the times, opened the colorful life of human beings in the past few decades with its outstanding performance, but its degradation problem has also become the Achilles heel of human development, deeply threatening the safety of our future generations.
Not surprisingly, the first batch of plastic products produced in the 1950 s still exist somewhere on our planet. Until today, plastic is still being produced in large quantities, which not only brings convenience to our life, but also causes extremely serious white pollution. According to the existing consumption rate of plastic products, by 2050, the global plastic will exceed 10 billion tons-which has caught up with the total carbon content of the world's crops, and our earth is gradually becoming a veritable plastic planet.
Marine plastic waste pollution harm far-reaching | figure worm creativity
At a time when the epidemic-led disposable plastics industry is expanding against the trend, the environmental protection of takeaway manufacturing should be taken seriously by all sectors of society.
On the one hand, everyone should realize that this is a problem, actively establish the concept of environmental protection, use more tableware, and strictly classify garbage. On the other hand, after understanding the hazards of traditional petroleum-based olefin plastics, we should also support the trend of tableware reduction and material environmental protection, and report to those new biodegradable green polymer materials that are still in their infancy. Be patient.
We must believe that our human civilization has a bright future, and we must not let those plastic particles in the mountains, lakes and seas become proof of our existence in hundreds of millions of years.
Shandong Chen QiEnvironmental protection molded pulp tablewareEnterprise Highlights:
1,Environmental protection of raw materials:Production of raw materials using sugarcane pulp, bamboo pulp, etc.Annual herbaceous plant straw fiber as raw materialEnvironmental protection and no pollution.
2、Advanced equipment: Chen Qi purchased advanced equipment, importedPLC programmable logic controller and LCD touch screen man-machine interface operating system, high production capacity, high degree of automation. The introduction of advanced mechanical equipment, mechanical automation.
3,Advanced technology: Chen Qi introduces advanced technological process, strictly checks the quality of products and raw materials, and standardizes production.ProcessTo achieve energy saving and consumption reduction standardized operation.
