European food packaging overview (2)

Second, disposable food plastic packaging and containers in Europe, plastic (PE, PP, PS, PET, etc.) is still a large number of disposable food sales packaging and containers. According to the data retrieved, Europeans consumed 15 kg/year of plastics per capita in the 1980s, and this number is still rising in the 1990s. In the communication with European food packaging professionals, the following points and conditions are worth referring:
1. Regardless of what disposable consumables are used, if their wastes are not properly disposed of and a reasonable system of consumer use is not established, it will cause environmental pollution. Due to the large volume of use of food packaging and containers, and with the movement of consumers, the pollution caused by the imperfect treatment process is particularly serious.
2. Europe has now abandoned its use of freon or ozone depleting raw materials and has used certain alkanes as blowing agents. This eliminates the environmental damage factor in the production of disposable plastic food packaging and containers.
3. European countries have a high rate of reprocessing for “living things” (items that are not considered to be garbage). The European concept of “no waste, garbage is also a resource” is just like the content of China’s ideological education. Inculcated, people grew into habits of not throwing things away, and management measures for the environment were strictly in place.
4. For food packaging materials, a full-process assessment method, such as "Life Cycle Assessment," should be used. Compared with plastics, straws and paper food packaging that can be naturally degraded, from the perspective of resources and energy consumption, the energy consumption of plastics is reduced by more than 1/2 compared with straw and paper, and the consumption of materials is reduced by 1/6~. 1/5, and the comparison of the degree of contamination of the water body between the plastic product manufacturing process and the paper product manufacturing process, 300 plastic bottles and 1 equal capacity paper cans are equivalent.
5. From the point of view of economics, the transportation and storage costs of degradable materials are relatively high. For consumers, paper packaging is more than twice as expensive as plastic packaging. Therefore, the foreign understanding and treatment of food packaging plastics makes disposable food plastic packaging and tableware can be used without causing white pollution. It can be seen that in Hungary and Germany, many cooked foods and cakes mainly use plastic products; meat products and sausages use multilayer plastic film as packaging materials. Disposable plastic cups, cutlery, edible oil barrels are also plastic products. In many fast-food restaurants, disposable trays and containers are plastic and paper-based. However, because plastic products are cheap, they consume more than paper products. It is worth noting that the use of pvc material in disposable food plastic packaging is relatively small, but no ban policy has been found in data retrieval.
In Germany, industry insiders once said that the European post-processing method for household waste was learned in China in the 1960s, but this “primitive” approach has been systematically improved abroad. Now, except for the food packaging industry, other industries also automatically assume environmental protection obligations. Therefore, how to correctly and effectively recognize and utilize unique resources so that consumers and society can all benefit from it. We can get a lot of inspiration by examining the disposable plastic packaging containers.