Here's the thing. If the plastic is not microwave safe, then it is not any-sort-of-heat safe. The microwave is simply a heating device. The method is different but at the end of day, it vibrates molecules to heat em up.
Most fast food restaurants and food processing plants. Hot dogs in the plastic casing as they are heated in the factory. Fast food (taco places have meat bags that they heat up before cutting open for use).
Maybe in a sous vide? But a separate issue will be already-quite-hot food being put into plastic. Think they let your takeout noodles/soup cool before putting it in a plastic container?
Baby bottles. We use a bottle warmer that heats the bottle with steam, but yeah, I'd say breast milk/formula counts. That being said, I don't think I've ever seen bottles not rated as being safe for bottle warmers? And you'd never put a bottle in a microwave (process is too harsh on breast milk and consequently ruins much of its nutritional value, not sure about formula).
I've switched to mostly glass, metal, and wood kitchenware, but even those have plastic lids. I try to get paper milk jugs, which I thought were lined with wax, but apparently are plastic? It's almost impossible to get away from this shit.
Paper stuff that is meant to hold liquids will always be just a plastic bag with carton structure. Wax would be fine if you were filling and storing the liquid in your own home. But wax lined paper would never survive the shortest of transportation. Completely non-feasible for industrial scale agriculture. Soft drinks in cans also have plastic linings, metals are more resistant but would also eventually corrode in the midterm.
Does anyone remember the hysteria in like 2012-13 I think it was when people were freaking out about the wax on apples? Sure some suppliers were actually adding wax to their apples to make them shinier(and fuck the for that), but for the most part apples have their own natural wax as part of their skin.
We would be in exactly the same panic about wax as we are about plastic now, I definitely hate plastic but it feels like we are constantly being told to be worried to the point nothing is safe or should be trusted.
the wax was a sealant to make it easy to ship and prevent rotting. "one bad apple spoils the bunch" literally, so coat em in wax so the mould doesn't spread as much.
I never put this kind of plastic on the microwave. But I also worry about paper plates, which have some kind of polyethylene coating that is really really hard to find any info about online. Ive fucking eaten cheese that has been boiled on a "paper" plate, only to find that those plates were coated in some kind of polymer.
By the way, the insides of aluminum cans are coated in plastic.
Why? Like, is this equivilant to 'smoking cigarettes will kill you?' Or more, 'going within ten metres of a running automobile will kill you?' Because stress and anxiety will kill you dead too. So...
I suspect the next generation will be horrified that people ever cooked in plastic. Or ate or drank out of plastic. They'll think of it the same way we think of lead pipes now.
The evidence of terrible health effects of plastic seems to be adding up very fast. Pthalates, PFAS, and microplastics all seem to be implicated in the increasing rates of ill health, cancer and cardiovascular disease.
While I cannot read the article, the abstract does not describe an issue of microplastics transferring from the sous vide container to the fish, rather the effect of the high temps over longer time on the microplastics already present in the fish.