I participated in Plastic Free July enthusiastically a few years ago, and every year I get the emails encouraging me to participate again.
This year's email asked me to take a survey about my plastic use. I found myself answering more realistically than I have in the past.
Q: Will you ask the waiter to keep the straw?
A: No
Q: Will you buy grains in bulk?
A: No
Q: Will you bring a reusable coffee cup?
A: No
Q: Will you shop at the farmer's market to avoid plastic packaging?
A: No, because the farmers hand you stuff in even more plastic than at the supermarket and get all weird when you ask then to put it in your own reusable bag.
Q: Will you avoid lining trashcans with bags?
A: Sometimes. Sure I'll skip the liner in the bedroom and office garbage cans that will be full of kleenix, but not in the kitchen or bathroom where the trash is messy. Plus our municipality requires all trash to be in a plastic bag.
Some things I do all the time because they're already part of my lifestyle and preferences. I avoid bottled water and bottled soda because I don't like the plastic-y taste it gives the liquid. I make my own laundry detergent from borax, washing soda, and soap. We still own the same roll of plastic wrap as we did when we got married 5 years ago because we use it maybe once a year. We rarely use sandwich bags because we have reusable plastic containers instead.
Many of the things I said I was unwilling to try to change are addressing structural plastic use or involve going through major lifestyle contortions. Others are a lot of effort for very little benefit. Some are both.
Here's an example: toothpaste. I tried plastic-free toothpaste from a company called Bite. The toothpaste comes as tablets in a glass bottle shipped in packaging with recycled materials. It's a charcoal-based toothpaste, so the taste is a little different but I actually came to prefer it after a few days. I really liked the whole experience.
Here's the problem. It's $8 a month for toothpaste. Currently I spend about $10 a year on toothpaste. This is a major cost increase and the environmental savings is 2-3 toothpaste tubes a year. I just can't justify the tradeoff.
Since it's been a few years since I took the challenge, I think it's worth trying it again just to see what's changed and if there are any new habits that I might adopt. Last time, I was pretty successful, although it involved a lot of short-run tradeoffs that didn't stick as habits. I'll be writing about my experience here, and you can join me in trying to reduce your plastic use if you'd like! Even if we aren't perfectly successful at eliminating plastic, it's still illuminating to be aware of all the plastic we encounter every day, and how much of it is designed to be thrown away almost immediately.
This year I'll be documenting my single-use plastic interactions, including ways that I avoided using single use plastic.
Comments