more people (really, just ONE more person) to take up the challenge to reduce their plastic consumption, or to at least ensure their plastics all get recycled, not put in landfill.
I did the challenge for the first time last year, and drastically reduced the amount of single-use plastic I use, while also becoming painfully aware of how ubiquitous single-use plastic is in our lives. It is EVERYWHERE. And it's not just where we can see it. Even if your product sits on the supermarket shelf plastic-free, the chances are it got delivered swathed in plastic. I'm afraid to ask what happens to that plastic....
Trying to do grocery shopping without buying things wrapped in plastic is *really* difficult, not to mention expensive. Plastic-free bread (if you can persuade the bakery to put it in a paper bag, not plastic) is much more expensive that the $1 bread in a plastic bag (with a non-recyclable plastic tab!). In avoiding plastic, you're also avoiding almost all processed food. That's not a bad thing, as long as you're able to cook from scratch!
There are some non-reusable, non-recyclable plastics I can't avoid, such as the packaging for several of my medications. Well, I suppose I could avoid it by not taking those medications, but I'm not prepared to take that step just yet. In the meantime, I'm collecting all the empty packaging, and looking around for somewhere or some way to recycle them.
I don't just go out of my way to not buy plastic in the first place, and to recycle every scrap of plastic I can't avoid buying, but I'll also pick up plastic wherever I see it, and will take plastic bottles out of landfill-destined bins, in order to recycle them. Even when that annoys people (and it does). I've been pulling recyclables out of bins for 25 years; it's a hard habit to break.
And why do I do this?? Good question.
My current lifestyle isn't going to change just because every piece of plastic that was ever made still exists, and always will. Or because in the first 10 years of this century we produced more plastic than in the entire previous century. Or because landfill is full of millions of reusable and/or recyclable items that won't decompose. Or because our oceans are choking on plastic, and marine life is dying from becoming entangled in plastic, or of starvation with stomachs full of plastic.
None of that will affect me in my lifetime (I don't eat fish). I don't even have any children to worry about. But it *will* affect my nieces and nephews, and their children. And my friends' children. And my students, and their children. And that bothers me, a lot.
I can't even properly explain why it does bother me so much. I believe I'm on this earth for a finite time, and my influence is very minimal, and nothing I do - or don't do - really matters that much, but I still want to tread softly on this earth, and don't want to be responsible for any more thoughtless landfill than I already am.
So I will continue to eliminate plastic and other disposables from my life, and continue to pull recyclables out of the landfill bin to put in the recycling. And I'll keep plugging things like Plastic-Free July.
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