There is a great chance that your own cabinet is full of unsafe food containers made of plastics. There are other storage container options as well, e.g., glass containers, metal, ceramics, silicone, and wood containers. However, you need to carefully select safe and secure food storage containers.
Some of the best choices for storing your food and other consumables are aluminum bottles and glass jars.
Back in the day, food was packed in tin-plated containers. Then came along the plastic revolution that took the entire industry with its charismatic features. Its cheap cost ousted the tin containers from the industry, and plastics became the dominant choice for packaging for almost all the different products. However, recent studies have shown both of these materials as unsafe as packaging materials, especially consumable products.
You might wonder why plastic is unsafe yet so commonly found as packaging and storage material for all the different consumable products, including food and cosmetics. Plastic packaging is easy to manufacture, cheap to produce and has a stable supply chain. However, in terms of safety, plastics could ingest harmful chemicals and other contaminants into your consumables.
This is primarily because BPA is used to manufacture most of the plastics packaging used around the world, and recent studies have found BPA to be a significant cause of fatal diseases. Furthermore, plastics’ well-known adverse environmental impacts are also causing many cautious consumers to opt for alternatives.
On the other hand, traditional tin containers also contain BPA treatments when a tin coating is applied during their manufacturing. And for the same reasons as mentioned above, tin containers are also deemed to be unsafe.
In this blog, we will take a closer look at two packaging materials that are the safest and most sustainable amongst the rest of the alternatives – glass and aluminum food storage containers and bottles.
Glass Food Packaging
Glass packaging has been here for centuries, and it is still used today. It keeps food and other products safe. Glass comes with many benefits such as its design, sustainability, and safety. Glass is a natural product, free from chemicals such as BPA. In addition, it preserves the stored content safe from the external air and moist, which helps keep products in original taste and freshness.
It is also non-reactive with acidic content, which is a much-desired quality when considering food storage containers. In terms of sustainability, glass is recyclable, which vouches for its superior high-ranking choice for food packaging.
The versatility of glass material enables for manufacturing of different shapes and sizes of food storage containers. You can easily store your left of food in it with some sort of air sealing caps in the ambient environment, preserve consumables in the fridge and even use it safely in the microwave.
Thus, making it a great alternative to plastic food containers. According to research, it is proven to be one of the few materials considered entirely food-safe. However, a significant setback that glass material faces is its malleable nature, which means that it can break easily on impact.
Aluminum Food Packaging
When we think about storing food, traditional metal and tin jars often come to mind. However, they are not as popular as they once were. Now the industry is swiftly moving towards more safe and environmentally friendly aluminum food packaging containers.
Consumers also love the idea of metal packaging because of its eye-catching design and sustainable characteristics. You can use them for storing food at room temperature and refrigerator temperatures alike.
Aluminum is an excellent material, and it comes with countless benefits. First and most importantly, it is chemical-free, so there are no BPA concerns with it. Aluminum packaging is very light in weight. It does not rust, which makes it the best for storing liquid items over a long period.
This also makes for a catchy material in the industry as it guarantees low costs on transportations. Apart from being tremendously safe for food, it is entirely reusable and one of the most sustainable packaging materials. This is a major upside to aluminum as consumers are looking for a sustainable choice.
Owing to its versatile nature and low melting point, one can easily mold aluminum to make a variety of food containers, including aluminum bottles, cans, boxes, and more. Furthermore, its non-rustic feature adds to the safety of the products stored inside.
It is also a durable material that wins over the most significant drawback of glass, so people can use it much more causally as it doesn’t break on impacts. Overall, aluminum packaging is becoming widespread in the food and cosmetic industries.
All in all, considering the adverse health and environmental concerns of plastics and traditional tin containers, most people are now avoiding the use of old-fashioned tins and plastic food packaging. There is a constant surge in demand for more safe and sustainable food containers.
These alternatives might be a bit more expensive than plastic and tin containers, but overall the investment is worth each penny when considering the benefits they bring, as mentioned above.
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Great post, keep posting.