Day 9 of 20: Plastic! Plastic! Plastic!

Anyone who grew up on The Brady Bunch will know the tone of today's title.

Seriously though, while it's been somewhat easy to create less paper waste, plastic is another story. Today it's everywhere -- even more so than when I was a kid.

My first paid, after-school job began when I was in the 8th grade. It involved filing lab reports, pulling medical records for the next day's appointments, and "filling pills". I stood at a counter and counted 30 or 60, or whatever the standard prescribing amount was of various frequently-prescribed medications, which I then put into a paper packet and labeled.  

Paper packets are not permitted today. With few exceptions, medical prescriptions are now provided in plastic, child-proofed bottles which typically aren't allowed to be reused. Most over-the-counter medications and supplements, such as the Vitamin B bottle that I purchased before the challenge but opened just a few days ago, also come in plastic, along with two layers of tamper-proof 'protection' (and a wad of cotton filler). In addition to packaging to prevent theft, there's packaging to protect us from each other.

Plastic holds not only our vitamins, but every imaginable food, condiment, and drinking substance. We use personal hygiene products every day that are contained in plastic. We eat off of it when we use plastic dishes and we store our leftovers in plastic containers. We drink from plastic cups and bottles. We clean our teeth with a bristles on a stick of plastic. You name it: it comes in plastic and we've probably used it.

In the documentary, Plastic Paradise (mentioned in my first ever blog post) that inspired this 20-day challenge, I learned about how Bisphenol-A (BPA) in plastics can cause health problems ranging from infertility to cancer and diabetes, and that BPA contaminates us in unsuspecting ways, such as when we handle cash/credit receipts. You know you're handling a BPA-coated receipt when the receipt is slippery to the touch. These receipts leach estrogen-like chemicals into our skin through our hands.  To learn more, watch the film (no pun intended).

You've probably seen BPA-free plastics. Researchers are doing more to create plastics that are 'safe'. But are they?

One of my teammates, Sara, heard a program on NPR called The Safety of Plastics, Beyond BPA and shared the recording for this blog. Tom Ashbrook's first guest, Mariah Blake, says "there's no way around" plastic-packaged food. Our grandparents and great-grandparents did without it though.

The obvious answer lies in growing more of one's own food and shopping at farmers markets. Maybe someday, the U.S. will also promote these kind of stores.  "Europe has a precautionary approach", Blake tells Ashbrook. 

The obvious answer implies a non-obvious answer which is less strategic and more holistic. It involves living in such a way that we no longer feel the need to eat and take care of our bodies on the run. This points to how we use our time, a topic worth its own post.