Fuck Plastic! Challenge #5: Give up plastic

You know that feeling you get when you put the last of your change into the vending machine and what appears to be a 5th corner gets stuck on the spindle and you kick and throw your body into the machine with frustration but to no avail? That pretty much sums up the frustration I get when I see every other peer in my class with a one-time use plastic water bottle and proceed to watch as they all chuck them into the garbage can after class.

There are not many things I hate, I mean flat out wish everlasting death upon. On a spectrum with puppies and random acts of kindness at one end, plastic would be sharing the opposite end between cancer and animal slaughter. My original prospect for this challenge was something along the lines of “One month with no plastic…how about I make it the whole year!” until I quickly realized their were zero alternatives to a plastic razor blade that didn’t also include some other form of plastic. I’ll admit the cold mornings we’ve been having created a tempting rational to ban the blades for months to come, but out of consideration for my partner I am writing this article tonight and giving in to a brand new post-consumer plastic razor tomorrow.

Why the hate? Here is a 20 second debrief on the reasons plastic makes me question whether humans set out to challenge if they could create a product so environmentally catastrophic and intertwined into our daily lives that its removal seems next to impossible:

* It is intended to NEVER breakdown! Seriously? SERIOUSLY!?! *Bangs head *
* Made of oil. Choose your related issue.
* Do we really need to ensure that our cancer-causing everything’s are packaged in cancer-causing packaging?

For years I’ve cursed about it as more and more renewable and reusable products turned to one-time use disposables. So this past month I set out to see just how far I go without IT.

Fail one: my computer. Fail two: the desk my computer is on. Fail three: the chair I am sitting on. Fail four, you get it, the challenge was a lot less of a challenge and became more of an impossibility as I realized EVERYTHING (wait you’ll see) not only is made of plastic but has barely any alternative options.

Let me take you through my experience in two of the most frustrating of plastic-infested areas of daily life.



Personal Care

There must have been hygiene before plastic! First attempt at a plastic free shower leaves me with a lone soap bar. No shampoo, no conditioner, no cleanser, no razor and post shower no toothbrush, no moisturizer, no deodorant and no makeup. Lucky for me my hippy friendly Tom of Maine toothpaste comes in a metal tube and I was put together enough to leave the house. As I scavenged local health food stores and online ‘eco-malls’ I was met with further aggravation until the clouds parted and in the key of angels I heard “LUSH”. Based on the premise that words like natural, eco-friendly and ethical should be at the foundation of cleanliness this company stole my heart in 30 seconds. One visit and I was giving the old ‘dust off my shoulders’ to my longtime plasticized friends bottled shampoo, conditioner, deodorant and cleanser.

Food

Without even looking I knew that my cupboards and fridge were stocked with plastic sins so I skipped the tally and headed to the grocery store. Having just about finished the 100-mile diet I was sure that there was no food challenge that would steal my smile. A couple single apples, a cantaloupe and a head of broccoli were the extent of produce as everything else seemed to be either in a plastic container, wrapped in shrink wrap or held together by plastic mesh. Fresh made bread in paper bags, yippee! Except for the fact that each bag had this pointless window of plastic by which you can see your bread through….because the open end isn’t enough? Moving on through the store I met pasta all in bags (or boxes with windows), crackers in bags inside boxes and juice in the one thing worse than plastic; tetra packs. Well not to worry, three rows of canned food and I’m going to be laughing in plastics face. Except that behind that beautiful renewable-for-life tin can is a liner of BPA plastic. Grocery store fail.

This space will only allow for so much ranting but by having a look around you I can guarantee you will spot about another dozen of my frustrations this month. It seems our every day interactions with plastic products are made up of things that seem impossible to live without. Somehow though we were able to do it before and there are 3 billion people that still do. Maybe if we lived like the 3 billion people who below the poverty line we wouldn’t have a plastic mass floating in the ocean that is twice the size of the continental United States.

Look, maybe when our parents were our age they could share the mentality that the damage that is created won’t be experienced in their lifetime but we don’t share that luxury. We’ve inherited the plastic disease and we won’t be able to cure it unless we make the conscious effort to. I don’t have the solution to a plastic-free existence….yet! I’ll be working on it and I encourage you to do the same.

For additional information check out:
EnviroWoman http://plasticfree.blogspot.com/ - the journey of a woman that goes three years trying to live without plastic
Ithinkihateplastic.com – a forum to raise awareness and bitch
Lifewithoutplastic.com