Following conscience to kick plastic habit
Many consumers give up convenience and embrace conservation as environmental damage becomes more evident
For Beth Terry, the epiphany came when she read an article about how albatross chicks are being killed by discarded plastic. It was time to banish plastic from her life. First, she focused on her kitchen and got rid of the shopping bags, microwaveable Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese, Clif energy bars and the washed salads in plastic tubs.
Then she turned to her bathroom, where she switched to shampoo bars instead of bottles and made her own hair conditioner from apple cider vinegar. Toothpaste without plastic packaging was exceptionally hard to find, so she started making her own with baking soda.
Sometimes her personal war on plastic created awkward moments. During a vacation to Disneyland in California to run a half-marathon, Terry and her husband left their reusable cloth bags in the hotel, soon discovering that the local supermarket only had plastic bags. How to carry a bunch of apples, oranges, avocados and melons? “We just rolled it up in our T-shirts and carried it that way,” said Terry, 54, recalling how she crab-walked back to the hotel to stay true to her principles. “If I let myself off the hook this time, it would be easier for me to take plastic next time.”
Treating plastic like a drug habit that needs to be kicked is a lifestyle pledge being shared by more consumers, horrified by the nearly 300 million tons of plastic created worldwide each year, much of it in the form of single-use items like straws, that end up in landfills or the ocean. As a marketing term, “plastic-free” is emerging as the new “no carbs.” Stores that pride themselves on zero plastics have opened in Brooklyn and London, selling items like silicone water bottles, cardboard poop scoopers, biodegradable vibrators and iPhone cases made of flax.
Designers have embraced plastic free as a new challenge, whether it’s building a supermarket aisle without plastic or making ecofriendly clothing that does not involve virgin plastic. Celebrities including Jeff Bridges and SZA have joined the anti-plastic crusade. And there are many, many blogs and books that offer primers.
Even some Fortune 500 companies like Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo want a piece of the action. This summer, those companies will test selling products like Tropicana orange juice in glass bottles, Pantene shampoo in aluminum bottles and other items in refillable nonplastic containers.
“The awareness has exploded,” said Susan Freinkel, a journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area and the author of Plastic: A Toxic Love Story. “The movement to get rid of trivial plastic has taken off. There is a critical mass of consciousness.”
To exist in the modern world without plastic, however noble a goal, may not actually be possible. If you gathered up all your plastic waste each week, as Terry once did, you would have a huge mound on the floor. Where to even begin?
“The one thing I try to emphasize to people is to go step by step,” said Terry, an accountant who lives in Greenbelt, Md., and who is the author of Plastic-Free: How I Kicked the Plastic Habit and How You Can Too. “Don’t try to do everything at once. It’s been a practice of mine to not get overwhelmed by it all.”
That’s easier said than done, because once you wake up to the plastic problem, you see it everywhere: in jars of peanut butter and bags of grapes, in tubes of toothpaste and Tupperware containers, in bottles of Dawn dish soap and Tide laundry detergent, in the wrappers of Doritos chips and the lining of milk cartons.
“I thought I’d be able to find a plastic-free version of all the convenient foods I was consuming,” Terry said. “I didn’t realize that plastic made those foods possible.”
At the grocery store, you find yourself staring at a 10-foot shelf of yogurt brands, with only one in a glass jar: Oui by Yoplait. But you don’t like Oui by Yoplait. Also, it costs much more. What do you do?
To navigate the consumer minefield, plastic purgers develop mental maps of places where they can shop. It may take months, but they learn where to get milk in a glass bottle or which health-food store lets you grind your own peanut butter. And rather than see it as a huge inconvenience, they treat living plastic free as a fun game.
“I wake up and think, ‘How am I going to make it through the day without using any single-use plastic?’ ” said Dianna Cohen, 53, an artist in Santa Monica, Calif., and a founder of Plastic Pollution Coalition, an advocacy group.