Plastic’s not so fantastic

HI! I’m Alexis and I’m currently in Grade 6.

At school, we are learning about how to help feed a hungry planet by trying to find better food options and food that comes at a more sustainable cost.

Did you know that Australia alone uses around four billion plastic bags a year? Well, I bet you didn’t know that of those four billion bags, around 150 million of them end up in our waterways and oceans.

Fun fact! Did you know that plastic cups and plastic bottles take around 450 years to decompose, and plastic straws take about 200 years to decompose?

Have you ever thought about how the food we eat gets to us?

You may know that some of it is produced locally, and that some of it is produced in other states and brought down to our stores.

Some food can travel anywhere from 24km to 2400km from the farm to you.

Another thing about having food that has been driven from place to place, is the amount of extra carbon that gets released into the environment from the fuel produced by the trucks.

Do you ever wonder why grocery stores put plastic on cucumbers, or stickers on apples?

The answer for this is that it helps protect the cucumber from damaging itself. I think that this is a somewhat reasonable answer for putting plastic on cucumbers, but what’s the point of having stickers on apples? Well, for starters the sticker is called a “Product Look Up” sticker and it helps cashiers know how much a product costs and what type it is.

In my opinion it is just one tiny little sticker, but when you take all of those teeny tiny stickers and put them together you would have a lot of little stickers.

And the thing is, there are also stickers on mandarins, kiwi fruit, oranges and pears.

I hope that after reading this you will make an effort to reduce the amount of plastic you use every day, and before using something with plastic in it or something that’s made out of plastic, you think “How long will it be in the environment?”.

Another thing to think about is how far has the food you’re about to eat travelled to get to you?

These are all good questions that you can ask yourself before you use/eat something that has possible risks to our environment.