Independence Day

Posted 8/21/12

New York City’s ban on polystyrene single-use food containers took effect July 1, just in time for Independence Day. The largest American city to enact a ban joined the ranks of San Francisco, …

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Independence Day

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New York City’s ban on polystyrene single-use food containers took effect July 1, just in time for Independence Day. The largest American city to enact a ban joined the ranks of San Francisco, Washington DC, Chicago, Seattle and more than 100 other municipalities, including our neighbors Ulster and Albany counties.

Expanded polystyrene (EPS), most commonly known by the trade name Styrofoam, was developed by Dow Chemical in the 1940s as an insulative material and a crafts product—remember all of those home-made Christmas decorations? It starts as petroleum-based plastic beads; adding a blowing agent results in a material that is 95% air—cheap to produce and lightweight to ship. Uses for EPS snowballed, from packing material molded to the form of the product or extruded as packing peanuts, to the foam trays grocery stores use to package meats and even fruits and vegetables.

Most ubiquitous are the foam beverage cups and takeout containers used by restaurants and the fast-food industry. And that’s the problem: Americans trash an astonishing 25 billion polystyrene cups a year. The material doesn’t biodegrade. There is no practical, cost-effective way to recycle it on the scale needed. In the name of disposability, we’ve become dependent on a product that has a useful life of a few minutes or hours but lasts hundreds of years in the waste stream, sitting in landfills, clogging our waterways, breaking down into fragments that sicken marine animals and eventually find their way into the human food chain. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that 15% of all litter in urban areas is polystyrene food containers, and it’s the second most common debris on beaches.

Human health is also at risk. The manufacturing process releases hydrocarbons that contribute to ground-level ozone pollution and exposes workers to toxic chemicals like styrene, which is classified as a possible human carcinogen and neurotoxin by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). We ingest styrene from hot foods that leach it from foam containers. A 1986 EPA health study found styrene in the fatty tissues of 100% of the study participants.

From a lifecycle perspective, this product causes harm from manufacture to end use—and way beyond that brief useful life remains as a litter and pollution problem for future generations. Cost studies reveal that alternative materials are readily available at minimal added expense; some alternatives are actually cheaper, and all are a better deal than the billions of dollars Americans are spending each year in cleanup and landfill costs.

This Fourth of July felt like the appropriate moment for my husband and me to declare our independence from polystyrene, a pledge that will sometimes be inconvenient. So I am sending my deep thanks to the Narrowsburg Volunteer Firefighters for graciously honoring our request to put their delicious barbequed chicken in the aluminum pie plates we brought from home. It’s a small step, but perhaps it will snowball as quickly as the problem developed in the first place.

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