Pam Lewison: Ban it! Save it! Context is needed for the right answers

By Pam Lewison

Ask people if they think purchasing fruits, berries and vegetables for a family is important and I’d wager you’d find the answer the same in Spokane as Seattle; amongst Trump supporters as well as Biden enthusiasts, there is no significant demographic that is going to answer no.

Ask if they’d like to purchase their berries intact or smashed, or their fruits and vegetables ripe or rotten, and you’re sure to find overwhelming agreement again. Suddenly, we don’t look like a nation divided, but a nation united.

But appearances can be deceiving, and seemingly simple questions can lead to trade-offs and unintended consequences.

Because to achieve the sales of affordable, fresh, ripe and unblemished fruits and vegetables we need single-use plastics, and if you ask people whether single-use plastics are a good or bad thing, they will tell you they are bad.

That’s why we see proposals in the Legislature to get rid of them. House Bill 1900 – relating to implementing strategies to achieve higher recycling rates within Washington’s existing solid waste management system – proposes to effectively ban single-use plastics via the combination of requiring the majority of plastics in the state to be recyclable or reusable.

A similar bill was filed in the Legislature last year but stalled in the Ways & Means Committee. There are other bills on the same topic: HB 2049/SB 6005 – relating to improving Washington’s solid waste management outcomes.

Some small differences between all the bills exist, but there is one glaring similarity among them: None of them recognizes the need for single-use plastic in food packaging and sales.

Yet it is indisputable that single-use plastic food packaging materials provide essential functions for the preservation and sale of food items and the prevention of waste.

For example, clam-shell packaging is a single-use plastic.

Clam-shell packages are the lidded containers in which berries are sold.

Without them, well, have you ever tried to pick a ripe raspberry?

For the inexperienced, it can be tricky.

Too firm a pinch and the berry will turn into jam in your hand. Clam-shell packages offer protection to soft fruits by providing both a buffer from being handled directly and supplying appropriate volume-by-weight to preserve the fruit inside the container.

If you’ve ever reached the bottom of a berry container and discovered the mashed fruit, you’ve seen a preview for how much worse it would be if the berries were stored in a bulk container.

Another single-use plastic are the perforated plastic bags for potatoes, lettuce and grapes. Perforated plastic bags offer the air flow necessary to keep vegetables from spoiling too early and similar purchase-by-weight constraints as clam-shells. These bags help prevent rot and food waste.

Shrink wrap is another single-use packaging product that might initially be thought of as something “bad” but serves to accomplish an important good.

Shrink wrap provides for a critical need within our food packaging system: mitigating food waste.

Shrink-wrapped items – melon halves, precut and/or preseasoned produce and meat – cut down on overall food waste by using foods that may have been partially damaged during shipping or making use of less trendy cuts of meat.

Yet shrink-wrap around precut and/or preseasoned vegetables and meat would all be considered unacceptable under both old and new iterations of this proposed legislation.

By making use of produce that is otherwise edible by cutting off a damaged portion or prepackaging it in smaller quantities than would usually be available, grocers are offering a more cost-effective and accessible means for the elderly, low-income people and struggling families to consume fresh produce and proteins.

Rather than condemning the use of plastics that offer critical food safety and access to affordable nutrition, we should maintain and encourage the flexibility (that even the FDA recognizes as important) needed for positive, more effective results.

Preserving the benefit of single-use plastics for food packaging offers the best means by which to maintain an abundant and healthy food supply for all.

Single-use plastics have democratized fresh, local options for the consumers who need it most. They prevent food waste and aid affordable healthy eating.

Those are things worth preserving and show the question should be more complicated than “should we ban or discourage single-use plastics?”

Let’s hope legislators think about some of these complexities before creating a situation that does more harm than good.

Pam Lewison is Washington Policy Center’s agriculture director and is based on her farm in the Moses Lake area.