There is no such thing as disposable plastic

[usernamenumber]

So, about that oil spill.

Don't worry, this isn't going to be a rant about BP, the EPA, or anything else so grandiose. To be honest, I'm trying not to think about it too much, because it's so easy to feel overwhelmed and helpless, not just about the spill, but about less publicized issues like the damage being done to countries like Nigeria, which remain impoverished and polluted despite their oil production (thanks to faerieboots for the link-- the comments to which, for once, actually add to the article by illustrating some of the complexities of the problem).

But of course, I'm bad at not thinking about things, and so I have. One opinion that I've seen cropping up here and there, but not getting nearly enough attention, IMO, is that this is a lot bigger than BP being too cheap to properly test and secure their oil rigs. Ranting about how evil BP is, even if that's true, is a cop-out because it avoids asking questions that are harder, but more important. Why were they there in the first place? Why the reckless pursuit of this one commodity at all costs? Why does the issue of drilling in ANWR keep coming up? Because they are satisfying demand. Our demand. The demand implicit in our way of life. Maybe what we're seeing here is proof that that way of life is not sustainable, and as demand grows, the companies in the business of (literally) fuelling our lifestyles get more and more desperate to meet those implicit demands. We rant and rave when BP et al screw up, but people would also rant and rave if production went down, causing prices to go up. In short: the system is broken.

So, ok. I'm not pretending to be the first person to make these observations, though I do think they deserve a signal boost. I do, however, think I have a relatively novel proposal for what regular folks can do about it. And by "novel" I mean not related to how fuel efficient one's car is or how often one drives it, though of course I'm all for less driving and more fuel efficiency. No, instead I'd like to talk about packaging.

Try doing an experiment: For a day, a week, or for however long you can stand it, when you open a "disposable" container, wrapper, or any other plastic product you would normally discard, don't. Keep a bag with you and put it in the bag. It's shocking how quickly the stuff piles up. Also kind of gross, but then that's sort of the point. For one thing, of course, this stuff doesn't just disappear. It goes into a landfill where it will stay, out of sight and out of mind for a gazillion years if we're lucky, which we're not, but that's a whole other environmental issue. More relevant to my point than where it goes is where it comes from. Plastic products are derived from petroleum just like like gas. All those wrappers? All that "disposable" stuff? It's part of the problem, too.

So all the attention that the spill has been getting has given me the impetus to kick a personal project I've been doing in bits and pieces for the last year or so into high-gear. I am making a personal goal this year to reduce the amount of waste (recycleables included) that I produce. I'm not a chemist and I haven't done the math, but I'm guessing all that stuff adds up and, in addition to walking and biking more often, maybe I can make my own small bit of difference. Maybe I can set some more sustainable expectations with my lifestyle and still enjoy it as well. I'm finding that when one considers that maybe the things one is "giving up" are things to which one was never entitled in the first place, it's not that hard.

Here are some of the things I'm doing, and which I'd like to challenge others to do, too. Post your own suggestions!

No "disposable" water bottles. This is one I've been doing for years. Cheapo rubbermaid bottle + one backpack with side pockets = no need. More water, less expense and less waste. Win. Plus my backpack has a second pocket for my re-usable tea cup :)

No "disposable" utensils. Went to the sporting goods store and bought a set of camping utensils. They live in my backpack alongside the water bottle. Any time I'm at a restaurant that uses disposable utensils, I'll use mine instead. A quick trip to the bathroom afterward to rinse them off and they're good as new.

Fewer "disposable" dishes. These are tougher to carry with me, but for example, whenever I'm in the office for work, I have a salad for lunch at the cafeteria. About a year ago the number of "disposable" salad bowls this amounted to started to get to me, so I went to the local market and got my own bowl, which now lives at my desk. The people who run the caf were even kind enough to weigh it for me and deduct the appropriate amount from the cost of my salads.

Another easy one is eating in at restaurants more often than I do takeout or delivery

Fewer "disposable" wrappers and containers. This one would be dauntingly hard to fully eliminate, but I want to at least raise the bar for the circumstances under which I use them. Another example from the salad bar: they provide almost all of their dressings in those little Newman's Own packets, so I've switched to using oil and vinnegar for dressing, which they provide in re-fillable glass containers. It helps that oil and vinnegar turns out to be a lot tastier than I'd given it credit for, and I get to use exactly as much or as little as I want.

More bulk foods. I really wish more stores had those bulk bins where you take as much as you want, and use a simple bag, or ideally your own container for it (yes, sandrylene, I know Whole Foods does ;). Hell, there are so many products that could be sold that way (in fact, I can think of very few products that couldn't), but that aren't, even by the places that sell granola, et al in bulk. Looking at all the tiny little plastic bags and boxes we buy things in at the market, only to toss them a few days or weeks later, is starting to really bug me.

Fewer plastic bags. Yes they can be re-used, but if you're anything like me, the darn things reached critical mass a long time ago. I've bought the re-usables that pretty much every store has nowadays, but I keep forgetting them. Two things have really saved me on this front:
First, not using a bag if I don't need it. It has really started to bug me when I buy a single chapstick and the grocer immediately goes to put it in a plastic bag, so "no bag, please" has become almost automatic for any small trip. Even if I have to stuff some pockets, I can get things to and from my car without needing yet another bag.

The other thing was given to me as a stocking stuffer by my parents, and I don't think they even know that it's the single most useful present I've gotten in years. Whole foods makes these collapsible bags, which fold up into tiny little duffels about the size of two rolls of quarters. I keep two in my backpack and voila: any time I have my backpack, I also have everything I need for even a largeish trip to the store.

Make more food from bulk ingredients. This is one I'm not great at now, but I have some ideas. For example, I recently developed a taste for fruit salads, and had been getting them from the grocery store in these flimsy little plastic containers, which weren't even good enough quality to re-use. So this most recent time, instead of getting the pre-made stuff, I got plain-old-fruit and made my own. Portions are a problem, since that makes a lot and it goes bad quickly, but that's where housemates come in handy. :) I'm having similar thoughts about the canned soups that serve as one of my staples. I just need to find a recipe for reasonably healthy, vegetarian soup that is simple enough I won't be too lazy to bother. That last bit is, of course, the really tough part. ;)

...so yeah, you get the idea. I'm sure there's more, and I want to keep adding to my (re-usable) bag of tricks, hence the invitation to share other ideas. I still fall down at this a lot, and I expect that'll continue, so don't think me a complete hypocrite if you ever see me with a take-away container in hand, but every little bit helps... I hope. I also might look a bit silly at first (I have seriously gotten the funniest looks when I've said that I don't want a bag for my shampoo, for some reason), but if enough others do the same, that will change. So, what do y'all think?

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Whatever the impetus, these all sound like good things. Doing small things right can lead to big things, too, and doing them visibly (but not pushy-ily) helps others follow suit.

Reduce, reuse, recycle. In that order...

[breakinglight11.livejournal.com]

I think this is brilliant. I believe I shall try to adopt these measures myself. Thank you for thinking this through so nicely!

[rhosyn-du.livejournal.com]

They're slightly larger than the Whole Foods ones when rolled up, but there also exist Hello Kitty collapsible shopping bags, for those of us who roll that way.

[yunafonfabre.livejournal.com]

... wow, where could I get those??

[rhosyn-du.livejournal.com]

They have them in some sanrio stores, and they've also got some on sanrio.com.

[yunafonfabre.livejournal.com]

Squee!

Reduce, reuse, recycle. In that order...

[dougbunger.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

Stainless steel water cylinder. Watch out for that "cheapo Rubermaid" and its BPA content. The Canadians have already proven BPA is bad, but FDA says it doesn't their study count because they're not American.

Can we get Coca Cola company to go back to glass bottles?

Re: Reduce, reuse, recycle. In that order...

[rhosyn-du.livejournal.com]

Some Costco stores carry Coke in glass bottles. As a bonus (or, at least, it's a bonus to me), the stuff that's bottled in glass is sweetened with sucrose instead of high-fructose corn syrup.

[redfishie.livejournal.com]

have you ever seen the pictures of the garbage bag piles floating in the ocean? This was what got me to start using reusable bags about a year ago -- and once you start even with that and see how many you use it becomes shocking. I got my initial set at reusablebags.com - but really they aren't hard to make (really basic sewing skills for the win), and fold up and leave in your car or in a bag that you usually have on you.

[rubicantoto.livejournal.com]

Are you talking about that huge area in the pacific the currents have conspired to trap trash in?

[emp42ress.livejournal.com]

Most soups freeze really well. If you make several gallons of a few different types of soups, you can keep them in single serving reusable containers in the freezer. I've never actually successfully followed this pattern because I get bored too quickly, but I know people who have.

[lightgamer.livejournal.com]

First off, I totally approve of everything in this post and think you are awesome.

Second, I have found that a small set of sturdy tupperware containers are a godsend in trying to avoid stuff like this. Bring your lunch to work in them, keep one full of bulk granola handy for snacking, freeze leftovers in them. They're really easy to clean, too, even if you don't have a dishwasher.

[(Anonymous)]

This is kind of off-topic, because you indicated that you include recyclables in your waste count, but I think it's an important ancillary point:

Know which plastics are recyclable. Further, know what type of recycling is done in your area.

Where we live, for example, "disposable" plastic bags are actually recyclable because we have single-stream recycling up here. This, obviously, is not true everywhere, but it's amazing how many pieces of plastic people throw away because they "know" they are not recyclable, when in reality they actually were.

That being said, I don't believe anybody mentioned bringing tupperware to restaurants. Usually people don't plan, ahead of time, to bring leftovers home, so they don't account for the containers that leftovers come in when they calculate how to reduce their waste--and those containers are often Styrofoam, which is super-wasteful. So that's one more thing you can do, especially if you tend to travel with a backpack anyway. :)

Former recycling professional sez...

[rustycoon.livejournal.com]

Fewer "disposable" dishes. These are tougher to carry with me, but for example, whenever I'm in the office for work, I have a salad for lunch at the cafeteria. About a year ago the number of "disposable" salad bowls this amounted to started to get to me, so I went to the local market and got my own bowl, which now lives at my desk. The people who run the caf were even kind enough to weigh it for me and deduct the appropriate amount from the cost of my salads.

- Tupperware is your friend. Shell out the extra few bucks for the microwave/dishwasher safe with good sealing lids. They'll last a lifetime. I recommend Rubbermaid.

- Buying your produce from local farms at a farmer's market (and ensuring that the produce is locally grown) is more expensive (and the quality is usually not-so-hot) but the fuel costs associated with transporting the food are tremendously reduced. (The increases from the small-farm inefficiencies are usually not enough to offset those reductions, either.)

- In the same vein, buying produce that is in season as much as is possible is also critical since off-season produce comes from out of the country.

You won't feel the personal reduction in waste output, but you stop paying for the fuel that moves those goods when you stop buying those goods.

[hermitgeecko.livejournal.com]

This is an entirely commendable mission.

[sandrylene.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this post. I wish the baseline of all of our country were a little higher on the caring factor, and so I greatly appreciate seeing other people talk about it. (I feel like people are used to me being a crazy hippie and that I already get strange looks for dragging recyclables around with me when in places that don't have available recycling.)

I try to do reusable non-wasteful, not over-packaged stuff whenever possible, though I'm not perfect, to be certain, and I have my fall down days. I appreciate the reminder that there's a very good reason to keep thinking about it.

[usernamenumber.livejournal.com]

If you ever need another reason to keep in mind, there's always this. :(

Plastic in the sea is bad - on the other hand...

[(Anonymous)]

http://www.rubaduck.com/news/rubber_duck_news-200302-duckies_around_the_world.htm

"It's amazing what a duck
can teach you."
-Curt Ebbesmeyer, oceanographer

[archangelwells.livejournal.com]

Echoing what others said about good plan/reminder.

I keep forgetting to tell them no bag, and often they forget to listen when I say it. If I carried it up to the cash register without any help, chances are I don't need help with it past there either.

As to the soup: soup actually keeps pretty well, especially the stock part. I don't know off hand of any recipes for it, but basically, to make stock you overcook lots of vegetables in water (say, boil off about 1/4 of the water you put in, and have things cook for at least 2 hours... Depending on how much water you use, those two things might coincide). If you want to keep the stock unfrozen, taking out the vegetable pieces is good, unless you're going to use it within... a week? From the stock, you can then do things like throw in beans for protein and rice and other stuff and things and more vegetables and spices and so on. (If you put rice in your soup and don't want it to be mush, apparently pre-cook the rice.) The heating up of things that you just throw in takes less time than the cooking part, so if you do the cooking part at one point, then you have the reheat later. Also, most soups will freeze well, so you can make a WHOLE lot at once and save it in tupperwares. (your freezer is running anyway, may as well use the energy. and the more stuff in there the more efficient it is.)

[nurrynur.livejournal.com]

I've been trying, recently, to avoid taking plastic bags for bagging my produce. You can make your own reusable produce bags with clear mesh fabric pretty easily, or save the ones you got from your last trip and bring them with you.

Tupperware - I recommend the Rubbermaid EasyFind sets. They're bpa-free, easy to stack, the lids clip onto the bottom of the containers as well as to each other, and they can go in the freezer too. They do tend to stain more easily than containers with BPA, but I saw on the internet that a handy trick to keep tomato-based sauces from staining your tupperware if you plan on reheating in them is to spray the container with cooking spray first.

[rubicantoto.livejournal.com]

Related to your idea of keeping all of your 'disposable' plastic, I assume you have heard of the guy who kept all of his trash for a year as an experiment?

http://saveyourtrash.typepad.com/