The stuff is pretty loathsome, environmentally speaking. It takes forever to biodegrade, it clogs up waterways, and wildlife mistake it for food and ingest it.

The LA Times has more on the ban:

Sandwiches, milkshakes and other food items frequently packaged in foam takeout containers will have to be packaged in other materials under a bill that cleared the state Senate on Thursday. SB 568 by Sen. Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) would prohibit food vendors and restaurants from dispensing prepared foods to customers in polystyrene foam beginning Jan. 1, 2014.Expanded polystyrene foam, commonly known as Styrofoam, is a lightweight plastic that, when littered, is often carried from streets through storm drains into the ocean.

Of course, there are the usual protests from industry, which posit that banning the material will displace jobs. There’s no easy way around that, save for the fact that the producers of more sustainable forms of packaging will indeed create new jobs. It’s too bad that some people’s livelihoods depend on the production of a destructive, outmoded material — ideally, as the ban phases them out, a bridge can be offered to those in the industry to more sustainable packaging jobs.This is something that I’d like to see more consideration given to in general — public-private partnerships that can offer those employed in an unsustainable, archaic industry (coal, Styrofoam, disposable plastics, et al) ladders to jobs in those industries’ more sustainable counterparts (clean energy, reusable container manufacturers, etc).

But for now, suffice to say that it’s high time Styrofoam be given the boot.

Photo credit:  Los Angeles Times

Via Treehugger