Disposable fast food boxes are loved by people for their convenience in use, and can be seen everywhere in daily life. At present, most of the disposable fast food boxes on the market are made from polystyrene raw materials extracted from petroleum and added with foaming agents, which are heated and foamed. Polystyrene is a widely used polymer material with characteristics such as low toxicity, high melting point, strong plasticity, and easy production, making it the preferred material for making disposable fast food boxes.
However, due to the long degradation cycle of food boxes made of polystyrene, its degradation cycle can reach around 200 years in ordinary environments. That is to say, for a long period of time, maintain one's own polymer form unchanged. So what should be done with those discarded lunch boxes? Is it burned? No way. When they burn, they will produce more than 10 toxic gases, directly causing atmospheric pollution; Buried? Not really. In order to shape the material, various additives must be added during the production process. Over time, some toxic additives will gradually be released, causing damage to soil and water resources; So what about recycling and reuse? Unfortunately, their renewable value is very low, let alone the huge project of recycling so many large and low-quality lunch boxes every day! Moreover, the use of Freon as a foaming agent has been recognized by the scientific community as the "culprit" of irreversible damage to the Earth's atmospheric ozone layer. It can be seen that the difficulty in degrading disposable plastic lunch boxes is a major culprit in causing "white pollution". Moreover, the use of Freon as a foaming agent has been recognized by the scientific community as the "culprit" of irreversible damage to the Earth's atmospheric ozone layer.
Disposable plastic lunch boxes can cause significant damage to the environment, so are they harmless to the human body? The fact tells us that the answer is not so. Below is a brief introduction to several environmentally friendly lunch boxes and their advantages and disadvantages:
1、 Paper box
Paper is a type of material that people are familiar with. Replacing plastic with paper naturally became the first solution that people came up with. The technology of replacing paper with plastic refers to the production of disposable tableware using pulp as raw material, formed and dried in molds. Advantages: The tableware produced by this method is known as an "environmentally friendly product" due to its non-toxic, harmless, easy to recycle, renewable, and biodegradable advantages, and is currently a well evaluated alternative technology. Disadvantages: If evaluated from the entire process of paper production and use, this technology also has shortcomings. One is that the production of pulp requires a large amount of forest resources, while China's forest resources are limited, and a large amount of deforestation causes soil erosion, which is not in line with China's national conditions; On the other hand, pulp can cause serious water pollution during production, and in some cases, the pollution level may even exceed that of plastic. So from a macro perspective, using paper instead of plastic technology cannot completely eliminate environmental pollution, it just advances the pollution of tableware to the pollution of the environment when making lunch boxes. Furthermore, the high production cost of pulp makes paper tableware produced with pulp more expensive, so using paper instead of plastic is not a good solution.
2、 Plant fiber lunch box
This technology involves crushing plant fibers such as straw, straw, sugarcane bagasse, etc. to obtain fiber powder, then mixing it with a certain amount of glue or resin, and then injecting it into a mold to form under high pressure and high temperature. Advantages: The products produced using this technology have good degradability and rich sources of raw materials. Disadvantages: The disposable tableware produced by this technology does not remove fiber pigments during production (as chemical bleaching methods are required to remove the pigments, which will inevitably cause water pollution), resulting in unsatisfactory appearance and color of the product.
3、 Biodegradable lunch box
Biodegradable lunch boxes are a relatively good environmentally friendly product. It uses starch as the main raw material, adds one-year plant fiber powder and special additives, and is processed through chemical and physical methods to make a fully biodegradable fast food box. Advantages: Due to starch being a biodegradable natural polymer, it decomposes into glucose under the action of microorganisms and ultimately into water and carbon dioxide. In addition, the material blended with it is also a fully degradable material, so it can be said that it has no impact on the environment. The main sources of starch production raw materials can be plants such as corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava, and other plants that grow for one year. Disadvantages: Biodegradable lunch boxes are not perfect either. For example, most of the production materials are grain crops, and there are still issues such as mold resistance that need to be addressed.
