An everyday food that my family and I eat is normally rice but out of the idea of just rice, we eat rice with tofu soup pretty frequently. For our family, this is an OG, a classic food that we cherish. Not a lot is contained in the food but tif you think of packaging, a lot of plastic packaging turns up and we end up with quite a bunch of garbage at the end of our meal. All the ingredients there are is rice, tofu, salt, egg, variety of veggies and some pepper powder to give it a little kick to it. And all their packaging are plastic and Styrofoam. The upside about this is that these items are all items that you don’t just use them one time and waste comes out because when we buy rice, we buy the one with 30 kilos so we have to eat a lot to dispose one piece of packaging and the tofu, we just use half of it and use it next time so a bit of plastic after 2 soups. The salt, we have a container of 1 kilo of salt and for the egg, some Styrofoam is RECYCLED properly after we use 48 eggs. All the vegetables that we buy are all brought home and bought with no packaging so no waste is produced from vegetables. The pepper powder is stored in a plastic container and it is 500 ml so it is not a one time use, one time plastic waste.

The reason why only the eggs were stored in Styrofoam and all the other ones were stored in plastic is because if you stored eggs in plastic, it would be more difficult and more plastic would be used just for some eggs and more waste. But the reason why big amounts are stored in plastic containers is because, for example, rice, it is stored in large amounts and it is normally preserved in the bag so it needs to be sturdy so it lasts longer and the bag is pretty thick but tofu packaging is very thin compared to the rice packaging because it is a one use.

For the user, it is way more trustworthy when the food comes in some sort of plastic that was properly sealed so it means that no bad bacteria were in the food. And it is way more reliable if it is in plastic packaging as of it packaged in something else. As much people think that plastic is bad, people look towards it because so far, it is the most trustworthy material to package stuff with. The only negative part about the plastic is that, which is very very rare, but a little piece of plastic may be chipped and the piece of plastic may be embed into the food and it may go in you r body without you knowing since it is a very small piece of plastic.

After we use the food and the packaging is just the only thing left to dispose, all of it goes into the garbage which ends up at the dumpster somewhere nearby and they burn the garbage and the gasses that is emitted while burning pollutes the earth. After about 100 days, it is probably getting burned or getting transported. After a 100 years, it is probably all burned up.

For us consumers, there is no other way to change the packaging unless by signing petitions to not have plastic packaging. The people who make the products can make a change by maybe paper packaging which we can recycle/compost and we can reduce the amounts of waste produced. Although paper is still destroying trees, that is the only good way that we can move on to since there is no other material that is discovered yet. The other way consumers can reduce waste is that when they buy goods, buy from a farmer’s market and buy things without the packaging and bring your own bag so that you won’t need any other bags.