Styrofoam vs. Cardboard: First to Decompose Wins!
Why? That is my question. Why use styrofoam (expanded polystyrene foam) packaging? Granted, not everybody cares about the environment. Some say that styrofoam takes 900 years to decompose. Others say 2,000. What do I think? WE DON’T KNOW! This material was developed in the 1940’s. Maybe if Jesus had thought of it and started a landfill, we would know. But in truth, maybe it doesn’t decompose. It is completely resistant to oxidation and is artificial. No known organisms can or will eat it.
Back in the Golden Age of the oil industry, when oil fields seemed bottomless and locations for landfills boundless, we thought,”sure, why not?” It’s cheap to make, light, and even has great insulating properties. What better than this to keep your coffee warm an extra 30 minutes? But these same qualities which had once put styrofoam on a pedestal soon created a problem. These were not really economic problems, mind you, but logistical ones. And those most effected were not the producer nor the consumer (which is one of the reasons that we still produce and use this material at a staggering rate).
The problem: what to do with all this crap? It is extremely costly to recycle, cheap to produce (so why go the extra step to reuse, right?), and even when thrown away it is problematic because it takes up so much space (after all, it is 98% air).
But even though I wish I had a solution for the many tons and acres of styrofoam landfills, this is not the purpose of my post. I am here to ask why it is still used for wine shipments, and if I am not proven wrong in the comments of this post, to tell you to stop.
