I’ve set aside a week as Consume No Plastic Week. Here’s my progress report.
OK. It’s really hard to avoid buying or using plastic. Ridiculously hard. Our society is built on a foundation of plastic.
Heading to the grocery store, so much of what’s available has some sort of plastic packaging.
That glass bottle of hot sauce has a plastic lid. So much for using it on my eggs.
That six-pack of beer is held together by an ingenious plastic contraption into which the tops of each can snap into place. I’m both amazed by the creativity and dismayed by the fact that this creativity is used in the service of yet another piece of plastic instead of in replacing it with something non-plastic.
That loaf of bread comes in a plastic bag. In fact, all bread does.
Cheese? 100% of it is enclosed in plastic even though many cheeses are made in rounds that don’t require plastic.
Fruit? Apples, oranges, and most other fruits have plastic stickers on them which name the fruit and provide a bar code for scanning into the machine that demands our money.
So many boxed items have plastic liners. In fact, grabbing a bag of coffee didn’t work, because that paper bag is lined with plastic to keep the coffee fresh.
Most milk comes in plastic containers. And even the old paper containers now have a plastic pouring spout with a screw-on lid. After much looking, I did find one bottle of skim milk in a quart-sized paper container.
Once the initial onslaught of plastic at the grocery store is faced, some options rise to the surface.
Drinks bottled in glass often have metal lids. Silly Starbucks adds a completely unnecessary plastic wrap when paper labels work just fine. Some wine bottles also have plastic around the cork or lid while others are wrapped in metal.
Eggs often come in paper cartons, though plastic has made inroads into the world of eggs.
Some fruits and melons have paper labels stuck to them instead of plastic labels. Bananas do. Some mangos. Honeydew and cantaloup do. Some of these labels are so shiny with ink it was hard to tell the difference. The solution? Try to tear the label. Plastic labels stretch while paper ones tear. I know this seems nit-picky, but if we’re going to make a change to our plastic-littered world, we need to pick some nits.
But the real saving grace for me is the canned food section. The vast majority of canned foods are simply that: Food in metal cans with paper labels. Without these, I would be struggling.
All meats (except for cured salami) comes ensconced in plastic shrink-wrap. That is unless you approach the butcher directly. In that case, you can get your meat wrapped in paper with a paper label displaying weight and price and barcode.
I haven’t purchased anything in bulk, but it is possible to bring your own bags and buy bulk nuts, oats, raisins, and many other things without using any plastic.
It isn’t easy, but it’s possible to shop for food without buying any plastic.
Eating elsewhere is next to impossible.
I went to a memorial service and the food afterward was served on plastic plates with plastic utensils and the drinks were dispensed in plastic cups. Beyond that, eating at someone else’s place or at a restaurant doesn’t give the opportunity to consider the source. And really, I don’t want to be the kind of person who polices the source of foods at a friend’s house.
So did I make it through the whole week? Almost. But alas, I did stumble. What I hadn’t taken into consideration was my own family. And after a long, tiring day at work, that opened bag of Doritos was too much for me to handle after a week of self-denial.
Still, the exercise was well worth it. I am so much more aware of the amount of plastic out there and how difficult it is to reduce our consumption of it. But there are some bright spots.
What’s clear to me is we need to create incentives for developing different forms of packaging other than plastic. As long as plastic packaging is so inexpensive, almost every manufacturer and retailer will continue to use it. And we’ll continue to throw it into landfills.
Until the real cost of plastic packaging is passed on to those who use it, we won’t get past it. For instance, unless there’s a plastic packaging penalty of say $5 or 5% of the retail price of the item (whichever is higher), there will be no incentive to come up with alternatives.