Needless to say, one can't avoid consuming things that are designed to be thrown away without changing how one goes about living day-to-day.
Sometimes what's required is simply better planning instead of impulse-buying.
Earlier today, for example, I was in the neighborhood of a local frozen yogurt franchise that has an unusual condiments bar. My standard is "Euro-Tart" topped with little mochi balls, sour gummy worms, sea salt caramel drops and lychee fruit. I wanted some, and decided I'd be okay with throwing away the paper bowl, primarily because it's biodegradable and secondly, because food service establishments won't let you bring in your own. I didn't have a spoon with me though and couldn't justify taking another one, especially considering I already have a drawer-full at home...so opted to do without. (Interestingly, this franchise only offers disposable bowls and spoons in spite of the fact that it has in-store seating and could feasibly provide washable ones. I plan to ask about that.)
I've spent hours and hours reading and researching answers to questions that have emerged since June 11th. (On at least one evening, I lost track of time and skipped dinner, which left me hungry but not worried about meal prep garbage. This is not part of a sustainable waste-reduction plan, however....)
Dental floss is a good example of a valuable product that has always been packaged in plastic, unnecessarily. I would happily buy floss without the container and small parts that are choking fish and birds in the Great Pacific. How simple it would be at this point simply to reuse one of the many that I've instead put in the recycling bin, hoping they'll get recycled. This is yet another plastic that isn't on the recycling list, and the containers don't indicate which plastic is used. Recall from day 7: "only 9 percent of the total plastic waste generated in 2012 was recovered for recycling" (EPA Report, 2012).
(Turns out others are as frustrated about this one as I am. Found one suggestion that people who sew might want your empty floss containers (see the image at the bottom of this page). I also found a 2011 stop-the-dental-floss-packaging petition and emailed the author to see what became of it.)
Getting other people interested in doing it with you helps.
Many people are emailing and messaging me about how beneficial it is that I'm writing about this 20-day challenge because of the awareness this creates. My friend, Ginny, spoke of a family get-together:
"I was with my family this afternoon and told them about you, educated them on plastics and showed them some videos of what it was doing to the ocean. I believe it had an effect."This challenge would be a heck of lot less gratifying if I did it in a vacuum. It's fun to hear other people's ideas for solutions they've found, to generate conversations at work and in my social circles, and to challenge myself and other people to do better than we have in the past.
Everything alive today is counting on us.
I appreciate the comic relief that arises. Someone asked me yesterday what I do about toilet paper. Let me clarify: I'm not giving up toilet paper.
I also still choose to use a paper napkin/ towel at times when there's no readily-available alternative. In the larger scheme of things, this seems like a smaller issue compared to non-biodegradable waste, although I'm thinking about how seriously I want to take this challenge. I could bring a cloth napkin to work and to restaurants that use disposables. Lindsay, one of my teammates, told me about the cloth towels that people in Japan carry and use:
"In Tokyo, a city of 13 million people, there are no trash cans on the street, yet you will find no litter along the sidewalks. If a person has waste to dispose of, they put it in their purse or pocket and take it home (where they pay a hefty price to dispose of it)."One of my biggest realizations during this challenge is that there's little incentive for people to reduce consumption when we send our waste away. Much of our waste goes to other countries. We may not have the luxury of maintaining our ignorance for much longer, however. According to a Washington Post article in May 2013, trash was one of our largest exports to China, and China is growing less interested.
In order to make the impact of the challenge visual, I've been keeping the garbage and recycling that I've generated in my house and will inventory it at the end of the 20 days.
What if we all had to live in close visual and olfactory proximity to the trash we generated?
I suspect conservation would increase rapidly ...or we'd suddenly see reverse-looting.
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