Styrofoam is not only bad for the environment, but it’s bad for you. And it’s not actually called Styrofoam that is a name trademarked by our friends at Dow Chemical, the ones who brought us such environmental and health wonders as Agent Orange, napalm, silicone breast implants, and DBCP (a pesticide known to cause human sterility). So we should call it polystyrene which is the technical name for it.
Polystyrene is hazardous to human health. It contains the neurotoxins styrene and benzene, both of which are classified by the EPA and NTP as "known carcinogens" (as opposed to the lesser level "suspected carcinogens" or how about, "not carcinogens"? There’s a novel concept). There is growing evidence that these cancer causing toxins can leach into food that’s acidic, warm, alcoholic or oily and then into the environment after exposure to rain and other weather. If this is true, it means that it’s critical that you don’t microwave food in polystyrene or put hot food into polystyrene containers. Out of an abundance of caution, you shouldn’t eat from polystyrene at all.
Ask restaurants to wrap any leftovers in foil or if you are super organized, bring your own container. Don’t be afraid to educate restaurateurs about the health and environmental hazards associated with polystyrene. There are great alternatives out there, such as sugar cane based products, recycled paper products and corn based products. For packing peanuts, there are now biodegradable corn starch based packing peanuts that dissolve in water. Yes, these are all more expensive but guess what’s even more expensive? Cancer.
From an environmental perspective polystyrene is a disaster. About 500,000 tons of polystyrene foam is deposited in landfills in the United States and it takes up about 25 percent of the landfill space. Polystyrene foam is the worst of the packaging offenders. It’s made of non-renewable petroleum and once manufactured, it’s not biodegradable. It doesn’t break down in the environment for something like 500 years, it’s very difficult and expensive to recycle, it harms marine life, and it floats everywhere. After the Japanese tsunami, Alaskans reported that polystyrene accounted for 30 percent of the weight of the total debris that has washed up on beaches.
Polystyrene is difficult and expensive to recycle. As soon as polystyrene is contaminated by food (like crumbs or grease from your French Fries) it is no longer recyclable, and very few recycling facilities accept it even when it’s clean. Recycle Utah accepts large pieces of polystyrene used in packaging and densifies it. The densified product goes to market as an additive in creating cement-based decoration for freeways. Really. RU also accepts packing peanuts for people to re-use but doesn’t accept food-based polystyrene containers.
About 20 cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle and five major counties including Orange County, CA and Suffolk County, NY have banned polystyrene both because of the threats it poses to human and environmental health and because it can choke wildlife when swallowed. Seattle was particularly thoughtful it its approach to banning polystyrene because it recognized that the ban had to be part of a larger recycling effort. Dick Lilly, the manager for solid waste prevention in Seattle said "banning Styrofoam itself was a bad idea, because the replacements all have similar or greater environmental impact than Styrofoam" if they aren’t recycled. Seattle’s solution was to make sure they had facilities to recycle hard plastics and mandated that all take-out food containers had to be either compostable or recyclable.
The Bloomberg Administration has recently been under attack from the chemical industry for its proposed ban on polystyrene containers as well. The chemical lobby claims it will cost the city upwards of $100 million to ban polystyrene. Bloomberg claims banning polystyrene will increase recycling and lessen landfill impacts, thus saving money. According to the New York Post, "it costs the city an average of $86 per ton to landfill some 2 million tons of regular garbage — including Styrofoam — per year. contrast, the city nets a payment of at least $10 a ton for recycling paper and about $14 a ton for recycling glass and plastic." We don’t have specifics for how much the Bloomberg Administration thinks banning Styrofoam will save but it makes sense for New York to net payments for recycling instead of spending money on landfills, if this, indeed will be the result of such legislation.
The biggest foes of this legislation, besides the chemical lobby, are the vendors and restaurants because polystyrene is cheap and convenient. My recommendation to combat that legitimate concern would be for the cities imposing such bans to subsidize the extra cost of using compostable or recyclable food containers with some of the money its saving through the ban. That way the city still makes money and this legislation isn’t hurting struggling vendors and restaurants. Once there is enough demand for non-polystyrene containers, the price of those should start to decrease and the cities could stop the subsidy.
The bottom line is that you don’t need polystyrene in your life. For health and environmental reasons you should avoid it. You should make sure you aren’t using it in your office or home and consider asking your favorite restaurants to stop using it as well. Goodbye polystyrene.