Recently, I wrote about a jarring visual I had at a local Goodwill Donation Center, where all kinds of rejected plastic geegaws and what-have-yous were jumbled together with discarded clothes and linens. I was struck by how much we allow into our lives and our homes that then becomes burdensome shit.
I'm currently feeling that I'm overdue to go Cold Turkey with respect to buying and using plastics. After I finished cancer treatment, I made a decision not to drink—hot or cold—from plastic containers any more, and I've been pretty consistent with that. But other plastics are such a common and embedded part of my life, it's hard to imagine turning my back on them.
Some thoughts/memories about plastics:
*I remember being at a workshop in Silicon Valley about ten years ago. There were about 30 people in the room, and we were sitting with tables arranged in a big square. Event planners did not supply water, but everyone had a water container to drink from—two people had reusable stainless steel containers, everyone else was drinking from some kind of disposable plastic water bottle. That's a bad nonplastic to plastic ratio.
*I use ZipLoc baggies like they're going out of style, mainly to store leftovers and portable snacks. A friend gave me some beeswax food wrappers as a gift, and I have found them to be a very good substitute. My mother always stored leftovers in glass—mason jars of various sizes or repurposed glass containers. This is not a really difficult shift to make, but I have found it hard to be consistent, mostly because of convenience and force of habit.
*Back before Covid-19, when I went to thrift stores, I was always astonished and discouraged by the zillions of plastic, made-in-China toys from McDonald's Happy Meals that people would donate. (Did anyone every buy any of those things? Hard to imagine.) McDonald's—and everywhere else that uses this shit to rope in child customers: Please stop. I'm pretty confident that, after a kid plays with one of these things for four minutes, its near-inevitable destiny is landfill.
*A lot of the groceries I buy are packaged in plastic. Trader Joe's is notorious for this; so is Whole Foods; Safeway too. Actually, every grocery store I shop at is notorious in this regard. I know books have been written about zero waste, no-plastic lifestyles, and these are problems/issues/challenges that others have faced and resolved. This one—packing sufficient nonplastic containers every time I go grocery shopping--would require a pretty major overhaul on my part.
*Even at the farmer's market, there's a lot of plastic packaging. (The mushroom guy, to his credit, only uses brown paper bags.) You don't have to use the available plastic bags, of course, if you just put everything in your own bags. This is another one that requires a reworking and reimagining, and I haven't taken the time to do that yet.
*When I order things online (Aarrghhhh! Yes! I’m still buying stuff from Satan! I mean Amazon!), it often arrives in a ton of plastic wrapping, plastic bubbly junk, and even plastic envelopes. Why? When there are definitely compostable alternatives to all this plastic padding?
*I have been in many planning situations for various events where a decision was made to provide some sort of favor or give-away for children attending the event. Because it was cheap and convenient, Oriental Trading Company, with its catalog of pages and pages of plastic shit, was often the go-to source for these kinds of items. Honestly, the way we smother kids in plastic and sugar—these are always the "treats" and "rewards" that we seem to come up with—really needs to be examined.
*Years ago, a permaculturalist I used to work with in San Francisco cancelled his garbage pickup because any waste he produced became compost or went into the recycling bin. So his household had actually arrived at a point where they were sending nothing to landfill. Clearly, it can be done.
I've landed here, at the belief that weaning myself off plastic is necessary and ethical and I really need to start in earnest now, after watching Chris Jordan's trailer for his film, Midway, about albatross on Midway Island, a North Pacific landmass about 2000 miles from the closest continent. This trailer is not for the faint-hearted. It starts with beautiful, intimate footage of albatross parents and babies. The mood shifts, as the film shows albatross dead and dying. When the dead albatross are sectioned vertically along their undersides, one sees that their innards, from neck to bottom, are filled with plastic detritus from our world—plastic bottle caps, empty film canisters, and various other pieces of useless, plastic shit.
Of course, the plastic isn't generating spontaneously in the ocean where the albatross go to find food for themselves and their growing young. It's coming from us, on land thousands of miles away, because of our out-of-control plastic habit. One of the comments below Chris Jordan's video on YouTube admonishes readers to Stop littering! But I don't think littering is really the heart of the issue here.
We need to stop "consuming" and discarding plastic. We need to stop extracting petroleum from the earth and turning it into literal plastic garbage that nobody needs.
It won't be easy.
Here's a link to Jordan's trailer: