This week on plastic: how people are reducing their plastic consumption
September 13, 2007
Posted by CindyW in : Gems from Others , trackback
Plastic is definitely on our minds at Organicpicks this week.
Last weekend, I went to a kids’ birthday parties with my toddlers, an unavoidable experience every parent had to oblige a dozen of times a year. One of the things struck me was how much plastic there was in the birthday parties. 90% of the presents were made from plastic, 90% of the packaging was plastic, plastic plates, cups, forks. And goody bags full of plastic junk.
After the initial realization, I started to see that how much our everyday life involved plastic. First invented in the late 1800’s, plastic was touted as a miracle product. It has since entered every aspect of our lives. Even in the most remote corner of the world, plastic products are ubiquitous. In spite of its usefulness, plastic has come back to bite us. Hard. Alan Weisman depicts a macabre picture in “The world Without Us”. 35,000 years after humans disappear, “lead deposited during the smokestack era would finally be cleansed from the soil”. Yet plastic we are using today will still be there. The plastic toys that we are giving to our children today (which for the most part are forgotten in the garage within a couple of weeks) will probably be strewn about after a million years.
So this week we ranted about the lack of progress in waste management and reviewed alternative toy options. In addition we looked to others to see what they were doing to curtail the usage of plastic products.
Data is important, Minh from Envirostats.info cited that more than 51.4 million metric tones of plastic resins were produced in the US in 2006. That translates into 113 billion pounds!
PlasticLess author lamented that it was hard to find anything in Toys R Us that was not plastic. However She also reported that Coca Cola was planning to create recycling facilities that would be capable of handling all the plastic beverage containers that it produced. Hurray!
Paul Goettlich at mindfully.org has given up on plastic stuff a while ago. He has some great suggestions on how to work with non-plastic alternatives in your household, glass, Pyrex, stainless steel, cast iron to name a few.
Beth in Oakland works to reduce plastic waste in her workplace. The geek side of me loves her charts of weekly plastic waste. She wonders how to encourage people to use less plastic without nagging and preaching.
While I am still not certain whether I can ever live a plastic-free life, this woman is living it and documenting it. She has pledged to live without plastic for a year. Check out her progress report.
CindyW at Organicpicks
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Hi. Thanks for including one of my posts in your Blog Carnival. This looks like a really great new forum, and I’m happy to participate. Without the internet, we’d all just be single individuals working alone on these issues. Just think how much power we all have now through the ability to share information. Looking forward to reading and learning more from this blog.
We’ve been composting for years now and also coming up with a compactor full of plastic and cellophane wrappers as well. I was pleased that my garbage burden was down to less than a pail a week but I also was not happy about all the plastic that I could not put into our recycling bins. About a year ago, I started balling up the thin long plastic bags that our myriad newspapers get delivered in and putting them in the bag dispensers at our park for the dog walkers. They loved that, especially since those bins were usually empty. Recently, I decided to push this issue again and I went over to the Palo Alto Recycling Center at the way end of Embarcadero Road and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that, in fact, most of the plastic bags and other non-numbered types of plastic that they won’t take in their single-stream recycling pick-ups, they will accept for recycling when delivered! This means that all plastic bags, styrofoam without numbers, even wax-coated milk and juice cartons they will take. Now our garbage is literally down to the dregs, with just things like cellophane, chicken bones, and those fake credit cards that they send in unidentified envelopes to make you think there’s a credit card in there, so you should open it.
I just purchased a water filter for my home faucet and reusable aluminum bottles to carry water in. After learning that a lot of that water is just filtered tap water in the first place and is carried across the country (sometimes the world) in trucks creating more pollution, and that the plastic leaches into the water if it gets warm (who knows what happens in the trucks let alone my car) AND that plastic is seriously threatening the lives of marine animals, it was a no-brainer. I can’t believe I’ve been fooled into buying all those plastic bottles of water for soooo long! I recently read a “drinking water” label from my local super market that said it was from a municipal source in Idaho. I live in Los Angeles and I’m going to buy tap water from Idaho? Ridiculous!