How to Kick the Plastic Habit
Are you old enough, like me, to remember life before plastic grocery bags? (1977). I also still remember when there weren't foam coffee cups and plastic drinking bottles everywhere, and all the rest. Somehow we did manage...
In just a few decades, our collective consumption of plastic has become astronomical and quite unsustainable. Plastic consumes 10% of our oil consumption, is toxic to nature and to us, and it is overwhelming the oceans. In some parts of the vast plastic garbage patch between Hawaii and California plastic debris outweighs plankton (the basis of the ocean food chain) by 6:1. Marine birds and mammals are dying because their stomachs are full of our plastic debris rather than real food.
In fact, 10% of our plastic garbage ends up in the ocean every year, some from ships and platforms, but 80% from our litter washing down streams, rivers and storm drains. And then there's just the growing mountains and mountains of landfill waste, where most of it goes.
We can do better, and we must, not only with plastic but with all our trash. Each of us Americans generate about 800 pounds of waste a year, such as 300 million disposasble coffee cups a day, which can't be recycled. Ouch.
The good news is that 65% of our garbage could be recycled, 30-33% could be composted and only 2-5% is truly trash.
I like hearing that and my personal goal is that all my garbage is of the "truly trash" sort, and near zero.
For most of us, plastic is our biggest trash challenge. Just watch "Plastic Planet" on Netflix, the movie "Bag It," or read "Plastic-Free: How I Kicked the Plastic Habit and You Can Too," by Beth Terry, or "Plastic: A Toxic Love Story," by Susan Freinkel. They are life-changing eye openers.
And it's a change for the better. By switching back to earlier ways, before plastic took over our lives, we can greatly reduce our body's toxic load, not to mention the planet's. Amazingly, 93% of Americans over age six have BPA in their urine, a plastic used to line cans and found in sippy cups, dishes, tub toys, thermals receipts and hard polycarbonate bottles. It is a reproductive, developmental and systemic tosciant that disrupts endrocrine systems, increases birth defect, diabetes and certain cancers.
And then there's phthalates, added to PVC (polyvinyl chloride) to soften our cling wrap, squeeze bottles, and our vinyl binder covers, purses, toys, shower curtains, garden hoses, IV tubes, blinds, floors, siding, windows, wires and much more. Phthalates cause similar problems as BPA, disrupting hormones and neural development, contributing to asthma, autism and various cancers. These are just two of the bad actors in the production, use, recycling and breakdown of plastics.
Ready for change? Here's a comprehensive two-page chart for you to print out, read, and post on your refrigerator:
"How to Kick the Plastic Habit". Also, see my fun and useful Plastic-Free Household Items collection on Amazon.
Then get to work, bit by bit, finding fun ways to reduce plastic consumption and have a better life in the process.
When Richard and I shop for groceries, for example, we bring an attractive basket we keep by the back door, filled with:
-empty jars marked with tare weights and bin numbers for bulk foods, all ready to put back in the pantry at home when filled.
-Chico or produce and grocery bags
-Cotton canvas or "net" bags,
-A few of those polypropylene "fabric" bags, which I'll never buy again (can't wash or recycle; plastic; fall apart soon).
-a few re-used plastic bags and paper sacks (especially the nice ones for coffee beans) if needed. (til we run out....)
Not only does this reduce plastic and other trash, toxics and expense, it always impresses our cheerful checkout clerk, who remarks on it admiringly. But honestly, I wish it wouldn't. I wish it would just become what everyone does. Will you help me out?
Thanks!
