As mad Masala noted. End goal is reduce dirty products with clean.
He banana leaf thing is a very old idea used everywhere for hundreds of yeara. Now a marketing agent got their hands on it and ran with it great!
Problem with banana is they have steong strength with the length of their fibers, but between they rip easier than paper…much like how you see and read about bananas having trouble in high winds and get tattered leaves. But they still hold up, but just in narrow threads.
Taiwan uses alpinia zerumbet and bamboo a LOT for the same purpose. Bamboo has the same fiber issue as banana. Shell ginger slightly better. When they figure out how to market double or triple ply leaves that are criss crossed (like plywood), then they have something going that can compete.
Its a fun new industry. Mycelium packaging will take off faster and larger no doubt. We are already there. The question now is what can replace plastic as a flexible food safe option? Then we are at a point of no excuses.2
Was that for good or bad? I’d go with “bad” but I’m not sure/
As a side note, everybody should have their own reusable Chinese crappy cutlery set and no restaurant should be allowed to use disposable dishes, Chinese crappy cutlery cutlery or table tops.
I mean I’d think that regular wooden ones would be better because obviously you don’t dispose them, but then you still need to use a more valuable and limited resource (real tree wood) instead of using something that grows fast and abundantly, and I’m not 100% sure what argument you were going to use. Also we are talking about Taiwan an we all like to blame Taiwan
Taiwan switched to disposable chopsticks decades. Correct me if im wrong but i think it was hepatitis. May have been somethung else but pretty sure it was hep. Which by the way is back in a big way in taiwan. So now, instead of switching to bamboo bleached chopsticks (environmentally bad) now the CDC approach is to tell people to flush their feces laden tissue. Obviously but its a habit here till now not to flush tissue and throw it in the bin. Excuse numero uno is old pipe networkb which is false. Now, on a dime, its ok to flush. Old pipes all of a sudden new again. The difference? Disease. Its not for anything eco.
If people bring their own it will get rid of many problems. Its happening, kudos to taiwan for that. But shame of taiwan for the fda flops that have caused untold illness due to ego.
The eco packaging is very cool. But until food safety related concerns are resolved, it wont work as real food packaging. Its a fluff thing. A bunch of bananas are already wrapped in a peel and thus safe. No need for any package. But if we try stuff without a skin/peel (such as tofu) these concepts fall on their knees. So they are a temporary thing, albiet a very good thing as it opens peoples eyes to logic. You see a lot of lunch box places with bamboo boxes. But the extremists and the ones who do the research have problems there as well (mostly bleaching related to become food safe)
Take it from someone who has been hunting banana leaves in Taiwan for ages to make tamales: the problem lies in finding leaves that are intact, most are shredded to pieces like party ribbons.
Aside from that, they were used also in Central America when I was young.
