I have completed week one of my year without plastic. It is an experience akin to the seven stages of grief: shock/disbelief, denial, bargaining, guilt, anger, depression, and acceptance/hope. I am still in the shock stage – the more I focus on the plastic problem, the more despondent I become. According to a report in The Guardian:
“A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute and the number will jump another 20% by 2021, creating an environmental crisis some campaigners predict will be as serious as climate change.”
It seems pointless even trying to make a difference. Why bother to drink tap water from a glass if 999,999 people that same minute buy a non-recycled plastic bottle of water? Who am I fooling with my smugness?
To use a cliche, my effort seems to be worth not a droplet in the ocean, the same ocean that by 2050 will contain more plastic by weight than fish, according to research by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, quoted in the Guardian’s story.
Back to my first week’s effort trying to cut back on plastic: I was given a new coffee pot to make my own espresso-style morning coffee, which is going to be a big improvement on queuing up for milky coffee. As an experiment this past week, I only bought fresh food at my local shops and markets that was not wrapped in plastic – some of our meals were eclectic, to say the least.
The rest of my small household has been joining (beats being dragooned?) into the effort to reduce plastic. One of the best wins of the week was my son’s decision to put a useless $2 gadget back on the shelf when we were shopping at Kmart – after he concluded it was unnecessarily packaged in plastic and actually unnecessary altogether!
A friend who read my first ‘year without plastic’ blog post suggested I visit Biome and check out some of their eco-friendly products. It’s an alluring store – their target demographic is clearly young women who were enthusiastically purchasing vegan lipstick and the like – and I bought some useful things, like reusable beeswax wraps and cotton shopping bags.
At Biome, I also bought a set of stainless steel popsicle moulds – I decided we can make our own popsicles with fresh fruit juice to replace the horrible supermarket popsicles my husband loves which consist mostly of sugar, plastic wrapping and tartrazine. I had to chuckle when I unpacked the Onyx box containing the popsicle set. Every individual item of the new set was wrapped in plastic, for no apparent reason.
Why would a company, whose tagline is ‘zero waste – toxin free – ethical choices’ – sell products packaged in so much unnecessary plastic?
On a brighter note, I discovered that it was quite easy to cut down on about 80% of the plastic I’ve routinely used in the past. That 80-20 rule is one I’ve noted on a few blogs dedicated to the campaign against plastic. If a lot more people tried to cut back their plastic consumption by half which is really not hard we would make significant strides to cutting plastic pollution. How about we give it a go for the sake of this guy below?
