Our No-Plastics Year: Lessons Learned (and a Little Manifesto)

The Unavoidable and the Avoidable


Our No Plastics Year has come to an end, and it's time to reflect on the larger lessons drawn from the experiment. The past months have helped Rick and me see clearly the role of plastic in our ordinary lives. Every day, because we've been paying attention, we are faced with the fact that every material aspect of our daily existence is inextricably bound up in plastic. Even when we do not directly generate plastic waste, we rely indirectly on plastic-dependent products and industrial processes even to go about the simplest tasks. There is no way around it. But the experiment has helped us sort out the avoidable from the unavoidable.

I remember a few years ago our friend Pam committed to a period of living as a locavore – buying and consuming only food grown within a hundred-mile radius of home – to reduce the carbon footprint of her food consumption. She made many discoveries along the way that had not been at all obvious to her as a member of the general grocery-shopping public. For example, she learned that that while Oregon is a major cranberry producer, it is essentially impossible to buy Oregon-grown cranberries in the state. She also discovered that reading product labels was not sufficient: labels show where an item is processed, but not where its ingredients are grown. Experiments like these open our eyes to economic and infrastructural workings that are often invisible to us as consumers.

As I write – in a rustic wooden cabin in a forest setting – I am using a computer made partially of plastic, connected to a power source with a plastic chord, taking notes with a plastic pen in a notebook with a plastic spiral. I got here – and everything I'm using got here – in a car with plastic components, made in a factory that surely has many plastic components itself. I'm keeping off the chill with a fleece shirt; fleece is made of plastic. My shoes, my cell phone, my contact lenses and the saline solution they require – plastic is all around me, and this is just what I can see from where I sit. It is clear that we can live mindfully, but we cannot extricate ourselves from the modern world altogether and live a pre-plastic existence.

And in some ways it is a wondrous invention – so pliable and so versatile that its applications are almost without limit. It also occurs to me that in some instances, plastic may be a“greener” option than the alternatives. For example, plastic is much lighter than glass, so plastic food containers require less fuel to transport than glass ones. (My suggestion: eat locally!) And the jury still seems to be out on the disposable vs. cloth diaper debate: durable diapers go through an awful lot of water. (My suggestion: Don't have babies! Okay, touchy subject. I had a baby. I was even a baby myself once. Hey, some of my best friends are babies. Maybe a better bit of advice is “Have fewer babies.”) Plastic even has life-saving applications. I doubt any of us would want to return to the era of medicine that predated the invention of synthetic polymers.

At the same time, I see how wantonly, how frivolously, how thoughtlessly we use the stuff. There is no reason for every restaurant beverage to be served with a straw, for apples to be sold in clam shell containers, for fleeting squares of paper to be laminated. Single-use plastics, which comprise the biggest source of plastic pollution, are especially aggravating. Shopping bags, plastic utensils, straws, cups and lids, polystyrene takeout containers, and water bottles are all convenience items we can live perfectly well without. The damage they deliver is staggering compared to the tiny and transient moments of handiness they offer us.

The Damage Done

What is that damage? The question has been addressed exhaustively elsewhere, and I do not wish to publish a research paper here. I will just mention three big, obvious reasons that plastic is a problem.

• Ocean health. By now most people have heard of the Great Pacific Gyre, one of five gargantuan vortices in the world's oceans that have sucked in thousands of square miles of plastic trash, dispersed and continuously photodegrading (breaking down into smaller and smaller particles of plastic) so that there is no easy way to clean it up. These and other collections of trash are killing marine life at an alarming rate. And of course, these plastics can make their way up the food chain, threatening us as well as all the other life they encounter.
  
  
• Landfill space. Plastic is probably safer in the ground than above it. But landfill space is of course not unlimited nor impermeable. Plastics can poison water tables when city dumps leach contaminants. And when space is short, many plastics end up being shipped to third-world countries and burned for fuel – an air-polluting process that poisons many communities and harms other living things.
  
  
• Human health. Of course, the health of the land, water and air around us affects human health. Plastic is also entering our bloodstreams more directly from the products we use. Ubiquitous plastics such as phthalates leach from containers into our drinking water and food. Phthalates are powerful endocrine system disruptors, implicated in such health problems as miscarriage, obesity, Type II diabetes, numerous cancers and genital malformation.
  
  
  It seems reasonable to suppose that the research results are only starting to show up. We will likely learn more and more about the dreadful havoc that these chemicals can wreak. And the longer we go on living with the stuff, the greater and more awful its impact will be.

The Way Forward

In a summit meeting of two in September, it didn't take long for Rick and me to decide to keep on keepin' on with our low-plastic living. We don't have the stomach to return to pre-experiment consumption habits. Of course, household objects and personal electronics will wear out and need to be replaced. We will continue to travel. Plastics will wile their way into our lives because we cannot find alternatives and are unwilling to live without certain technologies and conveniences. But we are living, and intend to keep living, without a steady stream of the stuff coming in. (We did decide to abandon the cloth diapers – too hard on the washing machine – and have returned to paper – but to rolls wrapped in paper, not plastic.) The easiest place to shun plastic is in the grocery store, where we shop almost exclusively in the produce aisle and meat department: everything is bulk, taken from the store in paper or re-used bags from home. Other consumer goods, like clothes, we try to find second-hand before we consider buying them new. 

Rick and I have been trying to live in a low-impact way in part because it's simply the right thing to do, whether or not our efforts have a measurable impact. In this sense, our endeavor to live with little plastic is almost a spiritual practice. It has to do with wanting to keep a clear conscience, with living out a commitment to doing as little damage to the environment as we know how. Beyond a small pile of trash we didn't make, and a little peace of mind we did, what good came of the experiment? Writing and speaking about it – publicizing it – has been an important component of our no-plastics year. (This will be my last blog entry on the subject, but we've been invited to speak publicly on how we live, and will probably continue to accept speaking invitations for some time.) We are contributing to a stream of voices from around the country and around the world calling attention to the problem of plastic. The blog has inspired a couple people to try to carry out plastic-free living of their own, and inspired quite a few more to examine their own habits and cut back on their plastic consumption where they can. The amount of plastic discards these friends and acquaintances actually avoid may be immaterial. What is more important is the shift in thinking that comes with mindful consumption, because only when a critical mass of us begins to demand alternatives will our political leaders pay attention.

Our society uses plastic as though it were harmless, when in fact it has a very grave and irreversible impact on both human health and the health of the greater environment on which we all depend. We would like to see society reserve plastics for truly important functions, and stop putting it to silly uses. When, where, what and how it should and should not be used is a local, and national, and international dialogue we citizens need to be having. And after the dialogue – regulation. 

Here's the kicker: humanity needs to start using plastic in a fiercely discriminating way. But this discrimination will not be achieved one household at a time. The accumulated plastic Rick and I have avoided this past year – a truckload, perhaps – is absurdly negligible compared to the monstrous amount our nation (and other nations) generates. The two of us can't make a dent in that mountain. The efforts of everyone who cares about this issue can't make a dent in that mountain. The dent can only be made at the level of policy and of law. It can only be made by governments, and our most important work, as environmentalists, is to command the attention of our governments, and induce them to act on behalf of the highest good.

Un problema

I thought our substituting diapers for toilet paper was one of my more brilliant innovations (though it makes a surprising number of people feel squeamish to hear about). But in the end we may give it up. Here’s what’s happening: the diapers fray and hundreds of little bits of fabric and threads end up in the laundry sink, where they gum up the works and cause the sink to overflow. Last week I spent some time cutting off the frayed ends of the diapers – I call them frayzles – to see if that helps. What else did I have to do on a Saturday night?

Washed Ashore

Sea stars, fish, sea turtles, jellyfish and coral are among the marine organisms most affected by plastic pollution in the oceans. A recent, striking art exhibit calls attention to the problem. Called “Washed Ashore,” this touring exhibit includes giant sculptures of sea creatures assembled from plastic rubbish collected on Oregon's beaches. Lead artist Angela Haseltine Pozzi and scores of volunteers gathered the trash and built the sculptures, which are both spookily beautiful and appalling.

Plastic is a severe problem for ocean dwellers, who often mistake the colorful bits for food. Floating plastic bags look to turtles like jellyfish, their main food source; fishing gear gets tangled in reef organisms and chokes them. Plastic does not biodegrade, ever, but it does photodegrade – that is, break down into smaller and smaller pieces that remain, chemically, plastic. These tiny, colorful pieces get swallowed up along with or instead of plankton by fish and sea birds.

Sometimes the plastic is enough to kill an animal on its own – as many as a million sea birds and 100,000 mammals each year (1) – who choke or starve when they eat our plastic garbage. But plastic also kills another way, by acting as a sponge for waterborne contaminants. PCBs, DDT and other toxins concentrate in polymers and then make their way up the food chain, affecting all the animals – including us – that ingest them.

Though some 11 billion metric tons of plastic makes its way to the ocean each year (2), Haseltine Pozzi notes that the red plastic used in her fish sculpture is the “most difficult to find washed ashore, as research shows it is the color of plastic most often mistaken as food by marine creatures.” (3)

1. (http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/oceanissues/plastics_albatross/)
2. http://plasticpollutioncoalition.org/learn/common-misconceptions/
3. http://www.washedashore.org/

Why Not Just Recycle?

We have passed the halfway mark of our experiment, and my blog entries have slowed to a trickle because we've stopped encountering fresh difficulties in our quest to eliminate most plastic from our lives. We've solved most of our day-to-day plastic problems and discovered most of our workarounds. It's time for me to begin addressing the larger issues surrounding the Experiment – the institutional and cultural changes needed to address the problem of plastic, and why they matter.

When Rick and I first started talking about doing this year of no plastics, a friend said to me, “Why not just recycle?” It's an excellent question, and emblematic, I think, of where we are as a society in our thinking about waste.

If environmental awareness is a spectrum, we've advanced, as a culture, some distance since the beginning of the throwaway culture. We're past, for example, those television ads of the 1950s that touted the advantages of newly-developed disposables by showing fishermen dropping empty beer cans into a lake.

In the 70s we were taught not to be litterbugs – not to fling our fast food bags out the car window, but to throw them away. But where is “away”? As a child I thought our cities simply built their landfills in places where there wasn't “anything else.” You see the problem with that idea.

Recycling came along about that time as well, and forward thinkers began to practice it, though it required extra time and attention to sort, clean and transport recyclables. Rick developed a reputation as a vigorous recycler more than thirty years ago. I started recycling with gusto in the early 90s.

At some point the bigger cities introduced curbside recycling, and every few years the system gets better: more products are accepted, a greater variety of materials can be co-mingled, recycle bins get bigger and garbage cans get smaller. Conscientious urban citizens recycle, feel good about themselves for doing so, and look with disdain on people who don't follow suit. So what's the problem? Here are a few considerations:

• Not everything that is recyclable is recycled. Manufacturers who use virgin plastic put recycle arrows on their products precisely because they want the public to perceive plastics as harmless. But the presence of the symbol on an item doesn't mean that the person who buys the thing has access to a facility that takes it – or has the patience to find out what can and can't be recycled and to do the right thing. Many communities still do not have even basic recycling facilities, and many others have no curbside pickup. Sometimes there are no facilities because recyclers can't compete with manufacturers who use virgin plastic. There has to be a market for recycled items in order to complete the loop.
• Recycling is not a waste-free process. It takes fossil fuels to transport recyclables and to run the machines that sort and remake the items. Recycling also requires inputs of fresh water.
• Plastic (unlike aluminum and glass) is only partially recyclable. It degrades in quality as it moves into its next life, and so each recycled plastic item must also contain some virgin plastic. Often the new items are not recycled, but rather downcycled into things like bumper stickers whose next stop will be the landfill.
• Many items that are destined for recycling don't make it through the process. They get lost en route; they're taken out of the mixture because they're too dirty; they get jammed in machines.
• A large percentage of our plastic recyclables (as well as paper) is shipped overseas, a process that requires stupidly huge amounts of fuel. Moreover, it is sometimes not “recycled” at all, but burned to generate electricity. Imagine the emissions from the smokestacks of unregulated electric companies burning plastic shopping bags in India and China, and the health impact on the people living there.

On the spectrum of practices representing degrees of environmental awareness, recycling falls some distance from the one end, where we find, say, Love Canal. But it also lies quite some distance from the other end, which represents sustainability. We are not going to be able to recycle our way out of our environmental problems, and those of us who do recycle should not feel too self-congratulatory about it.

Recycling is important and necessary, but only for those plastics that are unavoidable. For the others, a better practice is DON'T BRING THEM IN THE DOOR IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Bag It

A couple weeks ago Rick and I rode our bikes to the screening of a new documentary film called "Bag It" about plastic and the problems it causes. In true Rick and Jan fashion, I left the theater feeling buoyant because the film affirmed so much of what we are doing, and Rick left feeling downcast about the state of the world. You can decide for yourself how you feel about the matter. Here's the trailer:

http://player.vimeo.com/video/5645718

Feral Bags

When we first began The Experiment, we imagined we might run out of re-usable plastic bags at some point. They can only be washed, dried and stuffed into a kitchen drawer so many times, we figured. But we've just passed the five-month point of our year, and our kitchen drawer is as crammed as ever.

For one thing, if we treat them gently, the bags do last. For another, they continue to come into our lives even though we shun them. We have not taken one single virgin plastic produce or shopping bag from a store these past five months, but other people give us stuff in plastic bags, and we snag them from public places when we can see that they're not going to get recycled.

Also, they multiply in the night of their own accord. Plastic bags need to be spayed and neutered.

Full Disclosure

We’ve added an item to the parameters – exceptions to the no-plastics rule -- and not for any profound reason except that we don’t want to give these things up: aseptic containers of soup and milk alternatives (the containers are waxed cardboard, but they have a small plastic cap.)

We’re both dairy-free; I put rice milk on my daily oatmeal and use it in place of milk in recipes, and Rick considers chocolate soy milk to be one of the four food groups (along with mustard, barbecue sauce and cookies.) As for soup, we both depend on it for our lunches. We don’t do sandwiches any more (sliced bread comes in plastic bags, deli meat comes in plastic bags) so soup is a less-plastic-laden alternative. I had lofty dreams of making homemade soup on a regular basis, but as you’ve probably perceived by now, I resist cooking, and I’m already challenging my resistance. I have been making some soups, but not enough to keep us well-lunched seven days a week. So there it is. If I were a better person, I would do things differently. But I’m not, so I don’t.