Another question I wish my mom were alive to answer. Why the heck did you wrap sandwiches in waxed paper?
Well, it seems you would want some kind of container to keep the sandwich together in transport. Bagging and wrapping seem like the obvious solution to containing something like a sandwich.
And wax paper or storage bags are supposed to be sanitary for contact with food. The inside of the stereotypical brown paper bag, less so.
The problem really requires looking at the full production stream to determine the environmental cost. It’s a complicated analysis, often with surprising results.
I doubt any refinery takes a fraction of the distillate specifically for slack wax. They would take a fraction for lube oils that would include a waxy portion that needed to be removed to refine the lube oil. This used to be done with precipitation and filtration, but my understanding is that it’s increasingly being done catalytically where the higher Mw alkanes are split into lower Mw molecules that are useful as lube oil. That’s why there is less crystalline paraffin wax these days.
I’ve worked on projects to replace wax coatings and it’s not as simple as it might seem. Partially refined paraffin wax (with some oil content), soy wax, palm oil wax, etc. can’t resist cracking, have insufficient heat resistance, stain the paper with oil, and so forth. Other problems relate to adhesion. These coated substrates have to invariably be bonded with an adhesive or heat sealed to themselves and the coating has to be tailored to work for this.
One of the reasons you see so many soy wax and other non-petroleum candles these days is that there isn’t enough paraffin wax, or it’s too expensive as a result, to make candles.
I like waxed paper in the home. We use it for a bunch of things.
Parchment is good but way more expensive.
I support the use of Vellum or glassine to wrap sammiches in.
As far as cups and plates go in a restaurant, not much we can do about it. They’re gonna serve on what they have.
My foam Sonic cups get reused til I get another. They will eventually break down if you use them long enough. (More than 2 days)