Eco Friendly Business

By: Alexine

If you go to most fast food restaurants, cafés or order takeout, you will typically run into foam cups, plates or bowls. I’ve also come across them at ski lodges in the cafeteria or with packaged meat at the grocery store. Although the foam dishes and trays are commonly used, there is a misconception that they have no effect on you or the environment. Sadly this is not the case. This every day item can have some negative effects on your health and the environment. Let’s explore why we might want to rethink using foam cups.

Here are a few reasons why polystyrene foam is a bad choice.

·         Styrene: This is the main component in polystyrene foam, which has been proven to be unsafe for your health. Granted it is FDA approved, but that doesn’t make it great for you. The chemical styrene is known to affect your nervous system and blood platelet level. When you consume a beverage or bowl of soup out of a foam dish, the hotter it is, the more styrene is released. This is why you should not put foam take-home boxes in the microwave. Not only does it disintegrate, but styrene releases into your food which in turn can be harmful to your health.

·         Biodegradability: The foam cups, plates and bowls made of polystyrene are not surprisingly non-biodegradable. This means that the foam last virtually forever and once produced are an irreversible waste product. This can seem not so bad in our lifetime, but think about the future generations. Those are the people who will have to live with all the waste from the current consumers.

·         Petroleum: The polystyrene foam is actually a petroleum product. Due to the fact that there are limited quantities of petroleum it is not an indefinite use product or renewable resource like paper. You can grow more trees to make more paper but you can’t make more oil. With this in mind think about other petroleum products that are more important than foam like medical supplies and fuel for transporting good. These are more valuable uses of petroleum.

·         Recycling: The claim that polystyrene foam is recyclable is true however few places are capable of doing so and the chemical companies are not so eager to help out. This makes the push to gather and recycle the foam relatively non-existent. Not only is it hard to gather but the cost to recycle the foam is actually more environmentally damaging than throwing it into the landfill. With the cost higher to recycle it doesn’t happen and the foam just ends up creating waste for the planet.

With an understanding of the harmful effects on the planet and our health it is reasonable to say that foam is a bad choice. Between the amount of trash and gases released into the atmosphere to produce items that could be made of other resources, polystyrene foam is really unnecessary. Hopefully there will be a lot less used sooner than later because every day trash is accumulating that contains a lot of foam products. By using alternative materials that are more earth friendly we can all do our part to leave a little less garbage in landfills for the future generations.