Modest Goddess

Occasionally environmentalists are annoying. Take a recent story on plastic food containers in Organic Style that discusses the dangers of plastic food containers. It says they shouldn’t be used to heat food (I guess we all know that). They should be thrown away if scratched (well, OK …). They shouldn’t even be washed in the dishwasher (huh?). In fact, they tell us, it’s better to just use glass containers.

I don’t know if the Organic Style people ever actually bring leftovers in to their Manhattan offices or just order sushi every day, but they should be told: There’s a reason everyone uses plastic. Glass weighs a ton, and is BREAKABLE. How is someone supposed to lug a glass container on a subway every day? A distant threat that someone, someday, may get some kind of disease from putting their salads in Tupperware is not going to be enough to make most people change.

I have a huge stack of plastic containers, and they get a lot of use. I have one glass dish with a plastic top that I use for food I want to microwave at work (and according to Organic Style, that plastic top shouldn’t be anywhere near the microwave). Even with the weight and fragility factors, I might buy more glass, but here’s the third factor: it’s expensive. My little glass dish cost six or seven bucks.

Oh yeah, and who has the time to hand-wash stuff? Who in their right mind in possession of a dishwasher would hand-wash anything?

It’d be much more practical for the editors of Organic Style to tell us the least evil kinds of plastic to use, if one must use plastic. Which ones are microwave-safe? Dishwasher-safe? Who can we lobby to make plastic less sucky? Now, I love enviros, and I am one myself, but one of the reasons it’s easy to hate them is they’re always telling you impossible things to do and making you feel vaguely guilty if you can’t follow them.

I do have to note one thing. The story caught my eye because it mentioned Nalgene bottles. I take one to work every day to drink water from and had been sticking it in the dishwasher. The story said that the number 7 plastic that it’s made from is not safe to put in the dishwasher. There’s plenty of information about the safety of the particular chemical, bisphenol-A, on the Nalgene site, but guess what? It’s all provided by the plastics industry.