Kari Sonde14:15, Jun 30 2021 As cooks grow more conscious of the environmental impacts of their own kitchens - home or professional - some eco-unfriendly habits remain hard to break. Cheap and convenient, plastic wrap unfortunately does its job well. You'll find it littered throughout recipes to wrap foods for later, cover a bowl of dough, lay atop a dish to microwave it and more. Scott Suchman/For The Washington Post Look around your kitchen for items you may already have, such as compostable parchment paper, and think about making small tweaks to your kitchen practices. How did it even get into our kitchens? Plastic wrap went from a World War II item for safeguarding planes from water damage and transformed into a must-have kitchen item for the "modern" 1950s housewife.