I loathe plastic. It's so unorganic. It lasts forever and clogs up all the ecological systems. I yearn for things I can burn, compost, or recycle—paper bags, glass jars, cotton clothes. I am trying to get rid of plastic in my life.
It was easy enough with plastic bags. I have a ton of totes, and a friend gave me a box of small waxy paper bags to use instead of sandwich bags. I've pretty much transitioned to doing without plastic bags.
The rest is not so easy. Because all shampoo comes in convenient plastic bottles, I thought I would buy bulk shampoo at the coop and put it in a glass jar, but the bulk shampoo at the coop has fragrance in it, and I'm allergic to fragrances, so I"m back to shampoo in plastic bottles. I can buy milk in cardboard cartons instead of plastic bottles, but those cartons are plastic-covered and are neither recyclable nor burnable. I have replaced plastic wrap with tinfoil. I never use plastic dishes or tableware, but plastic is ubiquitous in the kitchen: my blender is plastic and those wonderful rubbery spatulas are plastic and the refrigerator is plastic.
This very computer is plastic. Even my car is plastic.
In a book of haiku I was given for Christmas, I read the perfect summation of the problem:
Plastic red sphere
Caps a pen. Extra plastic
For the Mariana.
Think about it. That tiny ball of plastic you rub off the tip of your new ballpoint pen and maybe throw in the trash or drop without thinking on the floor—even that is a minuscule addition to the accumulation of things that never dissolve or disintegrate or recycle into something else. Every piece of plastic we manufacture eventually ends up in the environment—on the roadside, in the soil, in the ocean. Every tiny, forgettable piece of plastic adds to the problem.
From plastic we have created an astonishingly convenient but totally unsustainable world.
My effort to live without plastic is an exercise in futility. But I feel cleaner doing it. Try it. You'll see what I mean.
Indeed! Well said! Thank you. Ironic to think that plastic is a "luxury" we can I'll afford! On our daily walks along the walkway by the ocean, we pick up trash. Cigarette butts on the ground, often under benches near trash receptacles! Otherpick up trashdo this, too. So the trash clean up is less than it was. Summers are the worst, because more people = more trash. I recently read that autopsies of every bird of a year round resident sea bird in Monterey Bay SANCTUARY, had microplastics in its body!
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