Plastic Free July is upon us! Rebecca Prince-Ruiz, founder of Plastic Free July, encourages people to take the challenge with friends, start small and keep a “plastic-free kit” on hand.
I’ve tried so hard to go plastic free but absolutely fricking can’t; it’s everywhere and in everything. Even minimizing it continues to be a challenge. I refuse to give up, but I’ve had to lower my expectations considerably.
Like Transporter Room 3 said: our individual plastic usage is probably not even a drop in the bucket compared to the waste generated by industry. :sigh:
Bingo!
Plastic is in EVERYTHING.
This is one angle that nearly everyone doesn’t get. Pickup anything around you, plastic is there.
All the solar/wind power stuff - massive plastic consumers.
And where do we get plastic (polymers)? Oil.
We’re not getting away from oil anytime soon. If anything, we’ll see improved recycling of polymer bases and supplanting of oil-based polymers with organics where we can…when the tech gets there (which will happen as the economic pressure to do so increases).
People hate to hear it, but economic pressures are just a proxy for resources (with some politics thrown in).
Anybody on prescription meds need not apply. (I know, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, it’s just this is so impossible to be plastic-free in our current society as an individual.)
That’s only one aspect of it too, there are so many other things plastic part of (some not so obvious).
Just a reminder that just because you buy experiences or products that apparently are plastic free, that doesn’t mean that those companies are particularly concerned about being wasteful, so you can easily be incredibly wasteful indirectly.
For example in a flower store I worked at we flew roses in from Kenya and all kinds of other shenanigans you wouldn’t want to know, even though we were branded as green. Let’s just say I know how to pack and unpack a lot of stuff quickly.
