Quite often I lecture Miss Peggy about the evils of placing plastic restaurant take home containers into the micro-wave to reheat a meal. She always listens and we place the food into a glass or ceramic container to heat. On this day, I got lazy and decided to test a particular takeout container; it appeared somewhat heavier than most we have received. Why not? I was being lazy and placed the food into the micro within the original take-home clamshell. I set the cook time for two minutes and felt nothing would happen in so short a time. WRONG! I looked at the container at one minute and forty-five seconds and jumped to shut the machine off. The sturdy plastic container was about to encapsulate my lunch. The issue here is that I know better. Having spent forty years molding various plastics and reading many Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) about the limits of plastics, I knew that styrene has an extremely low melt point. I knew that styrene is amorphous therefore it softens into the liquid state, as opposed to a crystalline material that has a sharp melt point like ice. Ice reaches the melt temp before it begins to melt. I knew that a low melt temp plastic like styrene also has a low combustion temperature just above the melt temperature. I knew that most plastics will outgas carcinogenic gasses, and or, breakdown into dangerous chemical components. Yet, I foolishly experimented anyway. What a doofus. When the product description warns you to use a micro-wave safe container to heat please heed the warning. So what is a micro-wave safe container? The safest is glass or ceramic. There are some plastics that can take the heat of the microwave, and they will be labeled as such. Please read all warnings and cautions that come with the container. 
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Filed under: Cooking, family, Food | Tagged: business, Chemicals, Glass, Material safety data sheet, Packaging and labeling, Plastic, Polymers, Styrene |
No short cuts.
Now I know better than to ever try plastic containers…and two minutes at full power is forever in a microwave! Engineers. Can’t live with ’em-can’t shoot ’em! 🙂