It’s not easy to get away from plastic

IAN Johnson, who is the environmental correspondent with the London Independent newspaper, wrote an interesting column recently, highlighting the problem with plastic and how much we depend on it each day.

He points out that, in just a few decades, plastic has become almost indispensable to human existence and we use it so much, we hardly notice it’s there.

To get a feeling for how much we use plastic, Johnson tried to stop using it for a month and found it incredibly difficult. Here’s how he reports the experience:

“Walk into any supermarket, particularly the small ones that lazy city folk like me use, and virtually nothing is for you. And if you happen to find pie in a cardboard box amid the gleaming ranks of goodies enticingly displayed in see-through plastic packaging, then beware. When I got mine home... it turned out it had been carefully preserved in shrink wrap. Pizza, I thought, would be a plastic-free treat that would help polish my somewhat tarnished halo of self-righteousness. I mean, they all come in a cardboard box so what could possibly go wrong? The little plastic tub of dipping sauce that came unbidden with the pizza was presented almost as a gift from the chef. Oh hell, I thought, suddenly remembering pizzas also tend to come with a miniature plastic table to stop the cardboard sticking to the cheese. Sauce had proved my downfall on the very first day of the challenge.

“My mind was perhaps not quite on the task in hand when I went for a clandestine meeting about a potential scoop in a city centre café. We sat down and began to talk and then the four cups of tea we’d ordered were brought to the table. All were in the usual takeaway cardboard/plastic cups with white plastic lids. I looked at mine, sighed for what seemed like the umpteenth time that month, and drank my tea. The lid seemed a particularly gratuitous use of plastic, given that its working life was all of about 10 seconds.

“There were a number of tricky choices. A lot of paper and cardboard packaging is mixed with plastic, and sometimes it’s hard to tell. I bought a couple of lovely Greek-style peppers stuffed with rice from a local deli. The box they came in looked like plain cardboard, but when I opened it, the inside had a plastic-like sheen.

“Overall I think I did manage to reduce my use of single-use plastic by maybe something like 75 per cent. There were many days when I managed to avoid it altogether. And there were other benefits. On several occasions, I cooked my own lunches the night before. They were tasty and a heck of a lot cheaper than buying a takeaway.

“I now own a coffee travel mug and a plastic water bottle that I bought a while ago has been washed free of dust. My water may still come in plastic but at least it won’t be single use. And, make no mistake, humanity simply cannot go on throwing away the amount of plastic that we currently do. At some point, we are going to realise this and do something about it. If we don’t, it is estimated that by 2050, there could be as much plastic as marine life in the oceans.

Giving up single-use plastics isn’t an easy thing to do, but it will certainly change your attitude towards it, and will encourage us all to value plastic as a resource and stop taking it for granted.