On the first day of her agency's Florida Energy and Climate Summit in Orlando, Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried Monday gave an update on the rulemaking process for phasing out styrofoam food packaging. Fried said businesses would need to provide regulators with a benchmark for how many of the containers they use each year--
"Let's just say for a hypothetical example they're using 20,000 styrofoam containers a year and if we're doing a 30, 40- whatever the percentages that we get to in rulemaking," Fried said, "that means they need to be able to show us after that year that they've reduced their usage."
Fried said alternative packaging will need to be developed quickly. She hopes business leaders are paying attention.
"You're talking about billions of dollars of replaceable products that have to come on line within a very short order. So hopefully there's enough entrepeneurs that are listening."
Fried says it's time to make Florida the capitol of entrepreneurship, of start-ups, and this is a great place to start. She says alternative packaging would need to be both safe and not degrade the quality of the food.
The Florida Department of Agriculture regulates 40,000 grocery stores, convenience stores and markets across the state but doesn't oversee the biggest user of styrofoam- restaurants. They're under the Department of Business and Professional Regulation- but Fried is still hopeful DBPR will see the importance of phasing out polystyrene products which have been linked to cancer, birth defects and liver and kidney damage in humans.
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