How food packaging harms the food itself?

• Food packaging does much more than simply hold a product. It keeps food safe and fresh, tells us how to safely store and prepare it, displays barcodes that facilitate purchasing, provides nutritional information, and protects products during transport, delivery, and storage.
• On the other hand, packaging also fills trash containers and landfills, lasting far longer than the products it was made to contain. It consumes natural resources. And it can also transfer chemicals into our food, with unknown health effects. Our relationship with packaging—you could say it’s complicated.

For millennia, humans stored their food in containers they found in nature—dried gourds, shells, hollow logs, leaves—as well as baskets and pottery. By the time, the art and science of food packaging have evolved a long way from those origins. Today, products often are wrapped in multiple layers of packaging to get them safely from the point of manufacture to consumers’ cupboards and refrigerators.

Plastic...

is highly used around the world. It is made from polymers, which are long, flexible chains of chemical compounds. Plastics are easily molded and shaped under heat and pressure. The amount of plastic produced since 1950 is about 9.2 billion tons. Much of this plastic ends up as trash. The packaging products made of plastic, often are not recycled. They end up damaging natural habitats, endangered wildlife and polluting communities around the world.

• Scientists have found a few organisms that break down plastic-Wax worms and Meal worms. These two types of worms turn plastics into compost. Also newly discovered microbe, called Ideonella sakaiensis, shrink time, plastic takes to degrade from hundreds of years to a few days.

We honestly do not even know exactly how long it takes plastic to decompose in the wild. Some estimations are around 70 years, while others are closer to 450 years. Plastic is usually made from a chemical composition called polyethylene terephthalate, usually just shortened to PET or polyester. This compound is a polymer, just like the main composition of cellulose (the main part of wood and paper), and plastic should in theory not be much more difficult to break down than cellulose. There are many different cellulose-eating bacteria that have coevolved alongside with cellulose, and specialized during this process. Since plastic is synthetic and pretty new, very few bacteria have the ability to biodegrade the plastic polymers into smaller molecules.

Biodegradabe plastics that are used in food packaging breakdown naturally into organic agents, from exposure to natural environmental factors such as heat and moisture. Traditional plastics are made using petroleum whereas biodegradable plastics are normally made using plant bases such a corn.