Reusable instead of disposable: EU ban forces food industry to rethink

Just in 2018 alone, the amount of plastic waste that EU countries produced totalled 29 million tonnes. The recycling rate is rising, but too much of our waste still ends up where it doesn’t belong: in the environment and especially in the world’s oceans.

In 2021, the EU ventured to make another push to drastically reduce the volume of waste that we produce as part of its “plastic strategy”. This new drive centred on single-use plastic items, products that are only used once and then thrown away. Many of these products have been banned across Europe since July 2021 and should be replaced by sustainable, reusable solutions. The food and hygiene sectors are particularly affected. The member states implement the EU ban in their national legislation, in Germany for example within the framework of the Packaging Act.

Many caterers, party services, canteen kitchens and long-distance caterers have come under pressure ever since then. This is because disposable products such as plates and food packaging are also on the EU’s red list. But what alternatives are there to disposable plastic – and which is the right one for you as a provider? Dinner-Max offers answers.

Is paper packaging now experiencing its great revival? After all, the material is renewable and less harmful to the environment than disposable plastic. But paper is usually completely unsuitable for packaging prepared food. It soaks up liquid, becomes unstable and tears.

Foil coatings or the addition of chemical substances make the material more resistant. But now paper can no longer simply be recycled or composted – and thus falls under the single-use plastic ban.

Aluminium consumes a lot of energy in production. However, thanks to its natural origin, it can be easily recycled. Assuming it was disposed of correctly.

Today, many consumers reject the material. Some studies have come to the conclusion that aluminium food packaging contributes to the accumulation of the light metal in the body. Health consequences could not be excluded.

In the case of bio-plastics, we distinguish between biobased and biodegradable plastics: Bio-based plastics are made from biomass, i.e. plants such as maize or sugar cane. Their cultivation is problematic: they require farmland that is actually needed for growing food. The fertilisers and pesticides used also pollute the soil.

Biodegradable plastics made of cellulose or degradable polyester, for example, are also only convincing in theory: they are supposed to degrade under certain conditions. In practice, however, it has been shown that the disposable material does not completely decompose in composting plants.

The conclusion of the Federal Ministry for the Environment (BMU): bioplastics that end up in the environment cause the same damage as conventional plastic! This means that disposable products made of bioplastics also fall under the ban on single-use plastics.