07 February 2011

Plastic-Free February - One Week Later

Remember the Rodale.com challenge a few posts down?  Here are the ground rules to refresh your memory:

1. No buying or acquiring new plastic.

2: No cooking with plastic or storing food in plastic.

3: Minimize all other plastic use.

A picture is worth how many words?



We almost always use cloth shopping bags, so all the other plastic you see above is for items that aren't available in bulk where I live. Pasta wrappers. Chocolate wrappers. Vitamin bottle. Chicken drumsticks for the cats - at least they weren't on polystyrene trays. What you see is a week into the challenge, and by two people who are pretty conscious about not buying throwaway plastics.

So what's the solution to the above? Make my own pasta? Forgo eating imported chocolates? Buy vitamins in glass bottles? Suggest that pharmacies dispense vitamins the way they do drugs and ask for paper wrappers? Ask a butcher to wrap the chicken legs in butcher paper? It can get complicated.

Clearly, avoiding plastics is not an easy proposition in the modern day - it takes endless acts of inconvenience to do it. That's a tough act in a society that worships the God of Convenience above all others, isn't it? I haven't touched on the issue of plastic storage, plastic appliances, plastic tools, and all the other "acts of plastic" in any given day.

Have you collected your throwaway plastic lately just to see what kind of an environmental impact you have in this small area?

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Temp: 42/3 snow on the way
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1 comment:

Lee Ambrose said...

I look at all of the plastic that is created each and every day at the hospital - all in the name of infection prevention...but way back in the dinosaur age when I first started to work as a nurse, things were not disposable... we sterilized and reused pratically everything -- and it seems to me that we have MORE infection now - not less.. granted there is the whole antibiotic resistance thing that plays into that but.....

I guess we all need to do our part and we won't change the whole world but we can lessen our own footprints, right?

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