Plastic environmental problem of over-food packaging

The landfill site in Hong Kong is nearly saturated. Plastic waste contributes a lot to this problem, and most seriously, the decomposition of plastic will release toxic substances while some of the plastic types cannot be degraded and recycled. The government has carried out some policies like the environmental levy tax to tackle the plastic problem. However, those policies focus only on the consumer side. The researcher believes that the reduction of use in plastic will be most efficient if the manufacturers notice the seriousness of this issue and change their packaging model. Therefore, this research focuses on examining the magnitude of the plastic problem on food packaging of biscuits and giving scientific evidences by developing a Plastic Environmental Index’s leveling. The development of PEI and leveling refers to the air pollution and water quality indexes which are strongly and widely accepted in academic field and currently used in the community. The pilot study of biscuit items is conducted for development of the new index and seeks to find out the real magnitude of plastic pollution in food packaging. The biscuit items are collected through the proportional stratified random sampling in order to reduce human subjectivity. The calculations and experiments were done with the help of scientific instruments to enhance research accuracy and objectivity. It is found out that 36 of the 74 items studied ranked very high in the PEI thus developed. This implies the seriousness of the plastic problem in food packaging. The last section covers in depth analysis and recommendations on minimizing the problem identified.