How to use less plastic…and why
For the past two years, I have chosen one month to do my best to not purchase any single-use plastic. I do it to bring awareness to the issue that plastic, a petroleum byproduct and massive environmental pollutant, is everywhere. Living plastic free may be a little more difficult - but it is so important.
WHY?
Let’s start with the facts.
Plastic is a man-made material usually derived from petroleum byproducts, which means it requires fossil fuels to create.
The reason plastic is so durable is because it has incredibly strong carbon bonds that organisms cannot easily break down in the environment. It’s unnatural and can take nearly 1000 years to degrade - so that plastic bag that you got take-out in and used for 5 minutes, will spend hundreds of years sitting in a landfill.
Many additives, like flame-retardants and BPA, are often added to plastic during manufacturing and other potentially harmful chemicals in the environment easily attach to it—threatening any life that ingests it (marine life like plankton ingest it and then it bioaccumulates up the food chain until WE end up eating fish with plastics in them).
This study estimated that between 4.8 and 12.7 million metric tons of plastic enters our oceans every year.
So what can you and I do?
Refuse it. Opt out of plastic packaged goods.
Buy unpackaged produce at the store or shop at farmer’s markets
Buy things packaged in glass, aluminum and paper
Bring your own bags to the store!
Call ahead of time when you are getting take-out and ask for NO bag and NO plastic utensils
Reuse. Reuse your containers, bags, etc.
Save your bags and use them to put stuff in next time you go out, or pick up dog poop, etc.
Reuse utensils or take-out containers so they get one more life before the landfill
Recycle. Only rigid plastics #1 and #2 are recyclable in SLO County.
CHECK the number in the chasing arrows on the bottom of your container - if it isn’t 1 or 2, you can’t recycle it.
Less than 9% of plastic in the world gets recycled, and recycling is a struggling industry right now. In fact, it is more profitable for companies to make virgin plastic than recycle it - so most plastic is getting sent straight to the landfill these days.
REFUSE plastic is the best thing you can do. Keep that in mind - recycling should be a last resort.
Bottom line: no one wants to swallow microplastics when they surf, eat it in their food, see it littered in parks, on mountains, or in lakes, or harm the wildlife that is forced to suffer the repercussions of our species’ carelessness. I still use plastic sometimes—it is everywhere and hard to avoid. But this isn’t about being ‘perfect,’ this is about trying your best and making small changes in your daily life.
If you refused two plastic bags a day and brought your own bags to the store or to a restaurant for one year, you would divert 730 plastic bags from ending up in a landfill! If, hypothetically, the entire U.S. population did that? (obviously this is including babies…it’s just to show the number impacts of 330 million people making one small change) We could save two hundred and forty BILLION plastic bags from ending up in the landfill or our oceans. Small efforts by everyone make a big difference.