Plastic seals food, sterile medical implements, medicine, beverages, etc… it’s seems like plastic is used as a way to seal things safely. Post pandemic rising, I see even more. My work used to be have plastic utensils in the cafeteria, for example, an already wasteful thing. Now, post-2020, every fork, knife, and spoon is individually wrapped in a plastic wrapper. I feel like the more my desire to escape plastic intensifies, the more plastic I see all around me everywhere.
How can we get away from plastic as a safety layer?
This maintains the problem of microplastics, which are now a ubiquitous chemical contaminant that we should be trying to reduce and remove.
They’re called bioplastics and they eliminate the threat of microplastic.
Using renewable resources to make plastic does not by itself solve that problem; you need the resulting material to be substantially different from the original.