Do not put plastic in the microwave
A bit of solutionist brain-storming here:<p>It seems to me that the main advantage of plastic food storage containers over glass ones — other than price — comes mostly from weight. You don&#x27;t want to carry your leftovers to work in glass containers; they&#x27;re heavy!<p>(And AFAIK no other container material besides plastic is a good substitute for glass in food storage, because 1. they&#x27;re not washable &#x2F; interact chemically too much with the food, or 2. they&#x27;re not visually transparent enough to tell what&#x27;s in the container. So let&#x27;s ignore other materials as possible solutions for now.)<p>I presume that the problem here <i>isn&#x27;t</i> that microwaves are causing vaporization or spalling of the container material in such a way that microplastic particles coming from the <i>outside</i> of the container can end up in your food. (If that&#x27;s the case, then plastics are basically entirely screwed for this use-case, and we may as well give up on them entirely.)<p>But presuming instead that the problem is only with your food interacting with the <i>inner</i> surface of the container, under heat&#x2F;acid&#x2F;etc — i.e. some kind of leeching or osmosis of the food against the container surface, causing the plasticizers in the container to &quot;exchange&quot; out...<p>Then, if that&#x27;s the case, would it be possible to make a food storage container that&#x27;s <i>mostly</i> plastic, but then has &quot;just a little bit&quot; of glass, lining the inner surface? A glass barrier-layer, sort of like how plastics themselves are used as a barrier layer on the inside of aluminum cans? Resulting in something that&#x27;s a lot lighter-weight than a thick glass container, but a lot more &quot;inert&quot; than a plastic container?<p>Glass is usually brittle, I know; and unlike a glass food-storage container, which is usually thick, plastic food-storage containers are usually more thin and flexible. A plastic substrate would want to bend, and that would, naively, <i>shatter</i> a glass &quot;film&quot; on its surface.<p>But! We&#x27;ve recently invented bendable (&quot;foldable&quot;) glass, haven&#x27;t we? And in fact we&#x27;re <i>laminating</i> this &quot;foldable&quot; glass to plastic substrates all the time. It&#x27;s even transparent!<p>I think it&#x27;s workable as a process. You <i>could</i>, in theory, produce glass-lined plastic food storage containers. I only wonder if it could be made cheap enough that, even at massive scale, these containers would come out at a price-point that anyone would pay.