Plastic product packaging is more environmentally friendly than the alternatives

By Kevin Kelly, especially for CalMatters

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Californians care about reducing plastic waste. Manufacturers, packers and food companies do too.

That’s why many in the fresh produce industry and even their packaging suppliers supported California’s landmark packaging law, the Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Manufacturers’ Responsibility Act (Senate Bill 54) — when it was presented and signed in 2022.

The original goal of the law was simple: reduce waste and improve recycling without compromising food safety and affordability.

However, the latest version of the regulation, released in January by the state’s CalRecycle agency, puts those goals at risk by ignoring how food moves from the farm to families. The revisions essentially call for a total ban on plastics in the food supply chain by 2027.

As an executive in the packaging industry, I would love nothing more than to find the magic bullet that gives us a realistic way to eliminate plastic from the food supply chain. I’ve been trying to do that for almost 25 years.

But the facts of the current supply chain cannot be removed. And ignoring this reality will endanger the health of Californians while driving up food prices, limiting food choices, and putting small businesses and family farmers out of business.

That’s why CalRecycle’s proposed ban is short-sighted: Most people only notice the packaging when they open it at home. But what people usually don’t consider is that by then he’s already done almost all of his work.

Packaging protects fresh produce from bacteria, dirt and damage while it is being picked, refrigerated, shipped and stored. It prevents cross-contamination, extends shelf life and thus reduces food waste.

Fresh produce is alive and responsive to its environment even after it is picked. The science that goes into packaging extends its life by letting oxygen in and carbon dioxide out, so the packaging must meet federal food safety laws, FDA food contact standards and California regulations.

Study after study shows that absent packaging, food is thrown away along with the water, fuel, labor and money used to produce it.

more greenhouse gases are released from food waste than from the production of plastics, according to a 2017 study by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. Authors recommendation? Use plastic.

The manufacturing industry is constantly evaluating new materials, but most alternatives do not provide the same protection against contamination and spoilage as current packaging.

It may seem ironic, but plastics are still our most sustainable option. We are still decades away from finding other packaging that performs as well as plastic when it comes to food safety and waste.

Compostable materials, for example, cannot match the shelf-life function of plastics, and they will also take a decade or more to produce at scale. Moreover, according to a a recently published Canadian government studycompostable products cost so much that they would raise food prices by 5-10%.

CalRecycle’s revisions to SB 54 ignore these facts in favor of a reckless and dangerous ethos that is a de facto ban on plastics: “If we enforce it, the industry will follow.”

This relationship shifts responsibility from CalRecycle’s own limitations to the backs of small businesses and family farmers. The problem isn’t that fresh produce packaging can’t be recycled. It’s that the recycling systems needed to process these materials need major investment to get there.

The manufacturing industry does not want to reject the law. Instead, we request that produce packaging governed by federal rules or guidelines for safety and shelf life extension be excluded from the recycling rates proposed by CalRecycle. Such exemptions were part of other versions of the proposed regulations, but were omitted from the latest.

We need time. Alternative technologies do not yet exist.

Ironically, CalRecycle may end up passing a law designed to protect the environment and instead allow it to increase food waste and greenhouse emissions and decrease affordability. It’s time to create regulations based on reality instead of ones that put Californians at risk.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.