Packaging on air plains

My post will desplay the horrific use of plastic on my flight from Atlanta, Georgia to Lima, Peru. Here you see my boxed breakfast. The packaging includes a variety of materials:

1.     A paperboard box

2.     A plastic and foil container for my peanut butter and one for my jelly

3.     A plastic knife

4.     A plastic bag for my bread (not film)

5.     A #6 plastic cup (on left) for my orange juice. 

6.     A Styrofoam cup (on right) for my hot tea. 

Note that my plastic cup on the left and my Styrofoam cup on the right are actually made of the same resin code: #6 aka Polystyrene. I use the word Styrofoam, a Dow Chemical trademark, as it is what polystyrene materials are commonly called and recognized as.  http://building.dow.com/media/trademark.htm

This picture shows a high usage of packaging and a variety of different plastics. Plastic recycling does not consist of one giant category where all types of plastics can go mixed together and magically turn in to new bottles. It is extremely difficult recycle combined resin codes and even sometimes the same resin codes together to make a difficult to create a marketable product.

The picture demonstrates how it would be next to impossible to set up a system to have these plastics recycled after flight. Also note that all these plastics are what most would describe as junk plastics; not highly valuable on any commodity market. The solution here is not to figure out how to recycle these plastics; it is to figure out how to not have so much packaging.

Also, when I asked the flight attendant if she could pour my tea directly into my old cup, she refused and mentioned something about Ebola.